#also did you know that Wolverines are actually the BIGGEST of their family?

[catwouthats]

I’m researching all the animals wolverine gets compared to so I can see which ones are most like him and to which degree they are like him.

Bro this shit is fueling headcanons…

His love language is definitely gift giving, but he wouldn’t usually say the gift is from him. It would just appear at the person’s place. Like randomly, his friends get random tiny things, and they have no fucking clue where they come from??? And things they thought they lost appear again?? They must just think they are lucky at first.

[nicomrade]

so i reread the scott pilgrim comics this week for the first time since 2019? lots of stuff happened in my life in-between + i learned to actually like, pay attention when reading so this specific reread felt really important to me- the issue of reading it in french for the first time aside. heres some misc thoughts i had while reading! some of this stuff is drawing from conversations about the comics ive had with people over the years, i dont mean to break any new ground here, and i dont have a specific lense to look at the comics through so its not structured like analysis either. full thoughts under the cut! i hope you all like going on this little trip with me ^-^

so first of, the X motif! this i KNOW i saw someone else talk about. it comes up first on scott's jacket with the X-men patch (and it comes up again in that context- "then wolverine is crucified on a big X") and also on knives' scott-shrine, her dad slashes an X over scott's picture. these are the two biggest exemples but there really are Xs constantly in the imagerie of the comics, which is great and i love. the comic is about fighting ramona's exs, and this is foreshadowing that scott himself will be one, but its also generally about the baggage that comes with existing. at its core its really comics about dealing with whats over, so we get into scotts relationships w envy & kim & knives (& ramona), but we also get into his relationship with lisa (what couldve been) we also see him move flats (the end of an era!), in volume 1 scott tells knives about the house he grew up in that now belongs to another family, scott breaking his bass & no longer being in a band, etc. theres sooooo many flashback sequences in these comics and references to the past… its all about the X.!

loosely related in the foreshadowing department there are genuinely so many background details of stories about people who dont matter to the comics that foreshadow later developments. the details of why Crash & the Boys changed drummers is straight up the dynamics of Clash at Demonhead, theres the Lucas Lee movie on the BG thats visually identical to scotts memory of when he got with kim- and the reveal that the lady in that movie wasnt dead is arguably foreshadowing for scott reviving in volume 6? if you know whats happening in the story, rereading the volumes really is so rewarding. it also helps on a first read cause unconsciously its not the first time you're hearing about these ideas so theyre easier to digest & accept. this is also what the character explicitely referencing what will happen later is for- "i wonder how the Boys & Crash can do music without instruments- maybe it will be relevant later in the evening" "i'd need a deus ex machina to beat todd", these help you accept when these things do seemingly "come out of nowhere" later in the scene (and poke cheerful fun at it lol these are fun comics)

a personal fave of mine is the phrase "read the comic sometime" thats repeated in the early volumes at characters who werent there for something. its 4th-wall breaking, its fun, it nicely tells lost readers where to head to without re-dumping exposition, AND it helps keep track of who was where for what scenes … stuff like "when did stacey & ramona become friends??" or "i cant believe this is stacey & neils first meeting!" or "wallace was already introduced to ramona earlier" … its all fun and helps you stay on the ride. i think this is why i would read the comics back to back to back to back and retained very little. its easy to passively read these comics and its not a bad thing! though it is better to actively read them, and take these notes as fun jokes & reminders, and not life boats.

the 4th wall breaks are also great for the side characters having their own lives in the background. there are a lot more time indications in scott pilgrim than i remembered, if youre paying attention i think its really really easy to have a nice timeline in your head. but when stuff is broken to scott its not "i started dating mobile during X month" or "i came out X months ago" its "i started dating mobile during volume 3" and "i came out during volume 5" that way the reader can more easily relate it to the story that was happening at the time- and to keep in mind during a volume reread. its not a writing technique for EVERY comic, but its something that scott pilgrim gets to have BECAUSE its a comic- and unapologetically so! this is not a work that wants to be more novel than graphic to be taken seriously. its a comic, and its silly, and its also a work of art, and you have to respect it on its own terms.

theres also, uhm, ill be quick on this point cause its kind of weird how lesbians/sapphics are handled in the comics. its not BAD but theres clearly a bias towards male homosexuality being fleshed out and lesbianism not so much. but so the start of volume 4 is when kim & knives make out and it really starts this obsession in scott about this thing he cannot tell anyone about but is still thinking about, that prepares for roxies introduction- ramonas ex girlfriend. that i believe is also when wallace first asks if scotts broken out the "L-word" yet and it gives more context to scott assuming its lesbians? and him then going all "why does everyone keep asking me about lesbians!" but it is also kind of weird re: lesbian fetishism (which IS pointed out with scotts weird poster that no one likes but thats it). and all that with ZERO canon lesbians! roxie is pretty bi-coded i would say with her insistance on being "HALF-ninja", but ramona is described as an american ninja in the early volumes so its kind of loose. idk its weird and i like to think julie came out as a lesbian cause stephen & her being a comphet4comphet couple is really good to me

a thing id never noticed before is that julie was suspecting stephen of having views on knives during volume 4? and its why she was so shitty to knives for a while there, and then its "worked out" at the end of the volume. this feeds into the constant fear of cheating during the story, theres of course todd & scott who do cheat, but also more grey areas of relationships. im thinking of ramonas anxieties around lisa, and when scott finds out roxie stayed over at ramona's. about stephen too, his response to julie apologizing for being jealous of knives is very… uncomfortable

"i have nothing to fear!" "right yeah..." surely because hes starting to realize hes gay, and possibly because he's already vaguely started seeing joseph. we dont get more details on his relationships i am not going to accuse him of cheating LOL. i truly dont care. but its an anxiety that comes up again and again whenever relationships are starting to turn sour- "are they cheating?" and having been in my 20s for a little bit yeah i get it. scott not telling ramona about his job- not telling her much of ANYTHING during vol 4- and ramona not sharing much either are also part of this. theres a reason all of this happens in volume 4, and next volume ramona finds out scott cheated on knives with her. loss of intimacy and the breakdown of dialogue is all part of cheating anxieties, whether there is actual cheating or not. "what do i not know? what else are they keeping from me? they dont talk to me but they talk to them? are they cheating on me?"

theres a really neat thing the comics do to show the breakdown of scott and ramona's relationship in volume 5 and its the scene where ramona goes shopping and scott tags along. she spends it not saying anything (until she tells scott she doesnt even like his band) and scott obsessively talking about his comics (X-men!) while she doesnt look particularly interested.

this is the scene where scott breaks up with knives again!!! the roles are reversed, scott is now the one talking about whatever while his girlfriend's unresponsive, and obviously ramona doesn't break up with him here and there, and they dont kiss in a goodwill, but the ressemblance is there. and like with the knives breakup scene, we have a good date variant of this! its their very first date from the first volume where scott does mostly talk about himself but ramona is having fun joking with him. here we are shown their relationship slowly crumbling and it lays the ground for ramona leaving at the end of the volume.

similarly to how scott battles all of ramonas evil exs (himself included), ramona does face all of scott's own exs. its not as spectacular but we see her fight knives in volume 2, then she fights envy in volume 3. we also have her comment on kim that she does like her (same with lisa, who is not strictly an ex but emotionally is treated as such. especially with how scott sleeping over at lisa's is paralleled with roxie sleeping over at ramona's) these are not comments she makes about stephen or julie, for exemple, its specifically women who had a close relationship with him. and uhm ramona also comments on liking wallace who- again- is not STRICLY an ex, but hes also part of that volume 4 cheating anxieties conversation, wallaces incessant flirting, mobile himself jokes (?) about finding wallace in the arms of another man, etc. but most convincingly to ME because we are talking about EXs here is the flashback of wallace inviting himself at scotts house being identical to lisas scene of inviting herself at scotts, scott saying the story of how he ended up living with wallace is "somewhat gay", and the general college flashbacks.

i think this points to scott & wallace having briefly dated in the past, or (because hes paralleled with lisa) having a "what couldve been" relationship where they didnt make anything of it and now the time window's passed and emotionally? kind of feels like an ex. and if anything they ARE ex-roommates lol. this is not a scollace truthing thing, im a firm mobillace guy ok -_- im just saying its there. back to the point of ramona facing scott's exs as well, YES i am including herself in it. her going to the wilderness during vol6 parallels scott going to the countryside, the very place he faces negascott properly. and the way ramona talks when she comes back its easy to see that she did face herself on that trip. & the figurines agree with me that the idea of a negaramona does exist :)

thats more or less all i had in mind, i also feel like i was finally able to properly enjoy the themes of the comics of facing your own shittiness and doing better, of the harms of being stuck in your own head, of never ending up like gideon (who is so attached to his exs that he literally cryogenizes them!) the warning of rewriting your own memories (or at least biased recollections of it) uhm how breakups suck! and how cheating is not always black & white but also fucking sucks !! being out of school (wanting to go back to school?) and looking for jobs- and yes if scotts life had a face i would punch it too its literally unfair how easily everything goes for him on that front, even freeloading with wallace (<- jealous). envys obsession with a guy who is so obviously shitty but who shes been best friends with since they were 11 is also kind of… ooh i get it now…. its yeah. i think they really are comics for being in your 20s, a lot about dating? but its so generally about human relationships and dealing with your baggage, i think it is still relatable without the specific romantic relationship experience.? i love these comics. everyone read scott pilgrim if you havent in a while (or ever!!!!) and try to think a little about it as you read it really is so worthwhile. and if anything theyre insanely funny, and wallace is there!

[the-king-andthe-lionheart]

So this is definitely in response to that certain dark section of our fandom (you know exactly who you are) who are throwing a fit about the Arya and Daenerys fandoms enjoying the possibility of a canon Daenarya friendship in the future.  So let’s look at all the quotes that possibly foreshadow a future Arya and Dany friendship and put it into context.

It was very dark right now, she realized. She hugged her bare knees tight against her chest and shivered. She would wait quietly and count to ten thousand. By then it would be safe for her to come creeping back out and find her way home.

By the time she had reached eighty-seven, the room had begun to lighten as her eyes adjusted to the blackness. Slowly the shapes around her took on form. Huge empty eyes stared at her hungrily through the gloom, and dimly she saw the jagged shadows of long teeth. She had lost the count. She closed her eyes and bit her lip and sent the fear away. When she looked again, the monsters would be gone. Would never have been. She pretended that Syrio was beside her in the dark, whispering in her ear. Calm as still water, she told herself. Strong as a bear. Fierce as a wolverine. She opened her eyes again.

The monsters were still there, but the fear was gone.

Arya got to her feet, moving warily. The heads were all around her. She touched one, curious, wondering if it was real. Her fingertips brushed a massive jaw. It felt real enough. The bone was smooth beneath her hand, cold and hard to the touch. She ran her fingers down a tooth, black and sharp, a dagger made of darkness. It made her shiver.

"It's dead," she said aloud. "It's just a skull, it can't hurt me." Yet somehow the monster seemed to know she was there. She could feel its empty eyes watching her through the gloom, and there was something in that dim, cavernous room that did not love her. She edged away from the skull and backed into a second, larger than the first. For an instant she could feel its teeth digging into her shoulder, as if it wanted a bite of her flesh. Arya whirled, felt leather catch and tear as a huge fang nipped at her jerkin, and then she was running. Another skull loomed ahead, the biggest monster of all, but Arya did not even slow. She leapt over a ridge of black teeth as tall as swords, dashed through hungry jaws, and threw herself against the door. - Arya III AGOT

Here is the initial passage that has to do with dragons in Arya’s story.  She comes across the dragon skulls in the dark and feels afraid of them.  She feels as if the eyes of the skulls were watching her and did not like her. She also doesn’t recognize them for what they are.  She initially refers to them as monsters, but later she comes to realize they are dragons: 

This time the monsters did not frighten her. They seemed almost old friends. Arya held the candle over her head. With each step she took, the shadows moved against the walls, as if they were turning to watch her pass. "Dragons," she whispered. She slid Needle out from under her cloak. The slender blade seemed very small and the dragons very big, yet somehow Arya felt better with steel in her hand. - Arya IV AGOT

Now admittedly the first quote does sound like the foreshadowing could suggest antagonism between Arya and Dany, but the second quote doesn’t suggest this.  Arya thinks of them as if they are old friends.  That is the most notable sentence of the paragraph, not the fact that she slid Needle out.  But when you actually look at this paragraph you actually see a duality here.  The monsters did not frighten her.  They seemed almost old friends.  Yet she slides her blade out and feels better?  So for me this quote just seems to foreshadow that Dany will be Arya’s friend, yet Arya will remain wary of her dragons like anyone naturally would be.

So putting these two quotes into context, it tells us that if Arya and Dany will meet they will initially be antagonistic and wary of each other (most Daenarya fans I’ve seen acknowledge this will likely be the case).  However it also suggests that this wariness will eventually fade and they will become friends.  Arya doesn’t need to think she is wholly safe from the dragons to have a friendship with Dany.  EVERYONE is wary about the dragons, just like most people would be unsure and most likely afraid if they were in the same room as a large cat or a bear. 

But this isn’t Arya’s only dragon connections in the narrative.  Arya’s closest relationship is with Jon, who is half Targaryen.  In Braavos Arya is fascinated by the courtesans and the Black Pearl in particular:

"The Black Pearl," she told them. Merry claimed the Black Pearl was the most famous courtesan of all. "She's descended from the dragons, that one," the woman had told Cat. "The first Black Pearl was a pirate queen. A Westerosi prince took her for a lover and got a daughter on her, who grew up to be a courtesan. Her own daughter followed her, and her daughter after her, until you get to this one [...] - Cat of the Canals AFFC

The woman with him could not have been more than a third his age. She was so lovely that the lamps seemed to burn brighter when she passed. She had dressed in a low-cut gown of pale yellow silk, startling against the light brown of her skin. Her black hair was bound up in a net of spun gold, and a jet-and-gold necklace brushed against the top of her full breasts. As they watched, she leaned close to the envoy and whispered something in his ear that made him laugh. "They should call her the Brown Pearl," Mercy said to Daena. "She's more brown than black."

"The first Black Pearl was black as a pot of ink," said Daena. "She was a pirate queen, fathered by a Sealord's son on a princess from the Summer Isles. A dragon king from Westeros took her for his lover."

"I would like to see a dragon," Mercy said wistfully. - Mercy TWOW

There is even foreshadowing that Arya will form a closer relationship with the Black Pearl in the future by becoming an apprentice for her so Arya can refine her highborn manners so it’s easier for the FM to place her into highborn society to do their work, because why not utilize a highborn girl in this way?

But also notice that Arya/Mercy is friends with a girl named “Daena” which is ridiculously close to the name Daenerys.  And in the same conversation with Daena (Daenerys) Arya/Mercy also said she wished to see a dragon.  And no this isn’t “Mercy’s” wish, this is Arya’s wish:

As Arya crossed the yard to the bathhouse, she spied a raven circling down toward the rookery, and wondered where it had come from and what message it carried. Might be it's from Robb, come to say it wasn't true about Bran and Rickon. She chewed on her lip, hoping. If I had wings I could fly back to Winterfell and see for myself. And if it was true, I'd just fly away, fly up past the moon and the shining stars, and see all the things in Old Nan's stories, dragons and sea monsters and the Titan of Braavos, and maybe I wouldn't ever fly back unless I wanted to. - Arya X ACOK

Doesn’t really sound like Arya hates dragons or have any issues regarding them.  She wants to see them irregardless of any fear they may inspire within her that everyone would naturally have upon seeing a dragon.

Arya also expresses a wish to fly throughout her narrative and she also has wing symbolism in her arc:

If I was a crow I could fly down and peck off his stupid fat pouty lips. - Arya X ACOK

If I had wings I could fly back to Winterfell and see for myself.  And if it was true, I'd just fly away, fly up past the moon and the shining stars, and see all the things in Old Nan's stories, dragons and sea monsters and the Titan of Braavos, and maybe I wouldn't ever fly back unless I wanted to. - Arya X ACOK

I wish I could change into a wolf and grow wings and fly away. - Arya XIII ASOS

She might be bald and skinny, but Mercy had a pretty smile, and a certain grace. Even Izembaro agreed that she was graceful. She was not far from the Gate as the crows flies, but for girls with feet instead of wings the way was longer. - Mercy TWOW

Also lets not forget how similar Arya and Dany are to each other and how many parallels they share.  They are both lost princesses exiled and sent to Essos, specifically Braavos, after their father's deaths at the hands of Lannister's.  They each know what it's like to be bought and sold and to be enslaved – Dany as a child bride and Arya as a child soldier.  And they both have pretenders trying to take their claims.  Both have been forced into becoming smallfolk, living in poverty and starved.  And they both know what it's like to be hunted and scared.  They adapt exceedingly well into other environments and cultures, and their morality and sense of justice are very attuned, as they seek to protect those that can not protect themselves.  Very protective, they are both empathetic and maternal and care for the sick, ailing, and dying.  Both of them are survivors and have both suffered abuse and sexual assault (more so for Dany, but it's still there).  They are both clever and know how to manipulate people.  They are both polyglots and both of their deepest desires are for home and family/pack.  They both try to live up to the image of their older siblings (ie Sansa and Rhaegar).  Arya is said to look and act like Lyanna and Daenerys is compared to Rhaegar by the people that knew him.   They are both very close to their house sigils and even dream about them and the mystical beasts they both own.  They both love horseback riding and they both have encountered mystical prophets.  Wanted/considered becoming sailors and they both have fantastic people skills.  Not to mention that it was Arya who said that the slaves should have killed the masters, while Dany is leading a slave uprising to overthrow and yes, execute the masters.

Dany is also not some “mad queen” and she does listen to the people who knew her father and Rhaegar.  She is learning the truth about the monster her father was and learning to accept that.  So there is no reason why Dany should continue to feel antagonistic towards the next generation of Stark’s for something they didn’t do.  

I’ve also seen comments about how the fire devastation that is within Arya’s story must clearly mean “Dark Dany” and that Arya and Dany will be antagonistic towards each other in canon when they meet.  I’m assuming these people are referring to the burning barn scene:

"You take her!" she yelled. "You get her out! You do it!" The fire beat at her back with hot red wings as she fled the burning barn. It felt blessedly cool outside, but men were dying all around her. She saw Koss throw down his blade to yield, and she saw them kill him where he stood. Smoke was everywhere. There was no sign of Yoren, but the axe was where Gendry had left it, by the woodpile outside the haven. As she wrenched it free, a mailed hand grabbed her arm. Spinning, Arya drove the head of the axe hard between his legs. She never saw his face, only the dark blood seeping between the links of his hauberk. Going back into that barn was the hardest thing she ever did. Smoke was pouring out the open door like a writhing black snake, and she could hear the screams of the poor animals inside, donkeys and horses and men. She chewed her lip, and darted through the doors, crouched low where the smoke wasn't quite so thick.

A donkey was caught in a ring of fire, shrieking in terror and pain. She could smell the stench of burning hair. The roof was gone up too, and things were falling down, pieces of flaming wood and bits of straw and hay. Arya put a hand over her mouth and nose. She couldn't see the wagon for the smoke, but she could still hear Biter screaming. She crawled toward the sound. - Arya IV ACOK

Arya rolled headfirst into the tunnel and dropped five feet. She got dirt in her mouth but she didn't care, the taste was fine, the taste was mud and water and worms and life. Under the earth the air was cool and dark. Above was nothing but blood and roaring red and choking smoke and the screams of dying horses. She moved her belt around so Needle would not be in her way, and began to crawl. A dozen feet down the tunnel she heard the sound, like the roar of some monstrous beast, and a cloud of hot smoke and black dust came billowing up behind her, smelling of hell. Arya held her breath and kissed the mud on the floor of the tunnel and cried. For whom, she could not say. - Arya IV ACOK

This chapter does not mean that Dany is going to go “evil” or “mad” and start burning stuff to the ground.  You guys do remember that Dany has three dragons right?  And that Dany is only the dragonrider to Drogon?  That leaves two other possible dragons that could be stolen from Dany.  We have Euron/Victarion who has the dragon binder horn and then we have Aegon who may or may not be able to claim one of those dragons for himself.  There is also the possibility that Euron dies or Aegon dies and someone else will take their places as dragonriders via Targaryen blood or use of that horn.  So besides Dany we have Aegon, Jon, Euron, and Tyrion who may all ride dragons within the story as they all have the proper set-up and foreshadowing for it to be a possibility.  So why is it the automatic assumption that it will be Dany burning shit down?   

Not to mention, wildfire has the same types of language used as the two quotes above:

And then some vast beast had let out a roar, and green flames were all around them: wildfire, pyromancer's piss, the jade demon [...] From bank to bank there was nothing but burning ships and wildfire. The sight of it seemed to stop his heart for a moment, and he could still remember the sound of it, the crackle of flames, the hiss of steam, the shrieks of dying men, and the beat of that terrible heat against his face as the current swept him down toward hell. - Davos I ASOS

So considering there not only is there a ton of foreshadowing that it will be Cersei who destroys King’s Landing with wildfire, but also there is foreshadowing that Jon Connington will do something incredibly drastic to win and keep the Iron Throne for Aegon.  And may I remind the audience that the fires Arya went through and experienced in the Riverlands had zero to do with Dany.  They were the direct result of the Lannisters.

So if Arya IV ACOK is foreshadowing a future fire she is stuck in, there is no evidence that the fire will be caused by Dany nor that the fire is dragonfire.  And if you are going to point out the show as evidence, let me tell you something, go to the youtuber The Dragon Demands and watch his videos dissecting everything about the scene of Dany burning King’s Landing by using the script, listening to BtS content, looking at the storyboards, actually noting that a scene of Cersei looking out the window, depicting her watching people put barrels of wildfire on the battlements, etc.  Because the compilation he makes proves that Dany burning KL the way that she did in 8x05 was a last minute change.  It was supposed to be an accidental wildfire explosion before they changed it so they could justify Jon killing her.  But I’m sure even with the evidence you’ll still cling to the idea of Dark!Dany because you are incredibly insecure about your fictitious ship and your blatant mischaracterization of your favorite “pure as the driven snow /s” character, because there is literally nothing in the books that foreshadows Dany going “mad” or “dark”.  So why don’t you take your jealousies about Daenerys and Arya and the very possible Daenarya friendship somewhere else.

[hoediaz]

okay but who’s who in the spiderman buddie au.

oh anon... you've just opened the biggest can of worms ever i'm so sorry for what's about to happen. this got. way too long so i'm putting this under a cut to save everyone but the TLDR is version is: eddie is peter parker/spider-man, buck is both johnny storm/the human torch and mary jane watson, shannon is gwen stacy rip. way too long explanation below if you care it's ok if u don't xoxo

first of all, i'm mostly going off of 616 comics spider-man & co just bc there's a Lot of it and i am deeply unwell. so. eddie is peter. eddie is also not peter, because i think 616 peter is like MUCH more aggressive and prone to violence than eddie would ever be. peter threw wolverine out of a window bc he vaguely insulted mary jane. eddie's foray into violence was demonstrably Wrong. peter being violent is like, a tuesday. however, there is a lot of overlap: they are both (sometimes over-)protective, they both have a very firm and clear sense of responsibility (again, sometimes to their detriment), they both put the weight of the world on their shoulders when no one asked (shannon's "bc eddie always know what's best for everyone, god forbid you stop for a second and actually ask them what they need" v peter core), they will both fight until the bitter end to make it back to their family, neither of them can hold off on being a little bit of a bitch sometimes, etc etc. two pieces of canonical pieces of evidence to support this that no one asked for: first, peter being an asshole about psychics (peter, you. literally have superpowers) and "he's never going to stop trying" yeah <3 ... Yeah <3

now. buck. now here's the thing, literally the first thing i thought when i first heard buck say, "as far as i'm concerned the world began when i was born," in s1e1 was, "wow johnny storm core." buck is very deeply johnny like, beat for beat, buck (and especially s1 buck) is johnny storm. surface level whore who really just wants a family above all else? hot tempered one second, crazy empathetic the next? raised and loved by his older sister more than anyone else in the world? surrounded by family and "meaningful relationships" but still feeling alone most of the time? clinging to romantic relationships that don't work, or are straight up bad for him? buck is quite literally johnny's tethered. johnny textually calling himself expendable and i'm supposed to be normal ok:

johnny and peter's comic relationship too -- starting off at each other's throats, eventually becoming best friends, johnny quite literally putting peter in his will, etc etc -- has a Lot of buddie hallmarks too.

buck also has BIG mary jane energy, which makes sense because johnny and mj are pretty similar as it is. (also. to be on my gwenmj shit for a second, buddie big gwenmj energy with mj talking about gwen: "she did her best to make [us best friends], even when i kept her at arms length, the way i did with everyone. she saw through the party girl mask i always wore, saw the frightened, abused kid inside.")

so i guess, to stop nerding out about spider-man for ten seconds and actually answer your question, in my image of a buddie spider-man au, eddie is spider-man no doubt. but there's So many different directions it could go for buck (peter biggest whore in all of comics fr) (the peterfel hero vs cat burglar angle would be delicious. the petermj soulmates angle -- one more day au where married buddie has their marriage and future daughter erased from the timeline absolutely delicious. the petergwen secret identity to Tragic End angle, peterjohnny rivals to besties angle. it's all delicious) BUT i think if i were to sit down and really write one, i would go with the buck as both johnny and mary jane. i'm not sure if i would go with buddie both being superheroes, eddie with a secret identity, buck as a pseudo-celebrity, or with eddie secret identity superhero and buck as a Normal Person (buck knowing eddie's spider-man p much the whole time just like mary jane did so real and so true). either way, shannon for sure as gwen, eddie's first love who he couldn't save. buck as both johnny (peter talking to gwen's grave: "but when i'm around johnny storm i can hear myself cracking wise again") and mary jane (staying with peter after gwen dies even when he tries to push her away) in the aftermath of everything.

honestly, the two things keeping me from a spider-man au the most are a) superhero aus require Plot and i am so bad at coming up with Plots and b) i would be so tempted to just. straight up copy the comics and swap out the names. the negative zone arc, with buck "dying" only to be (mostly) alive in the negative zone where he's forced to fight in gladiator style competitions, dying over and over again for two years (but only ~3 months for eddie & co)? the first person buck sees when he manages to get out of the negative zone being eddie? or, uncanny avengers #20, buck being possessed by the red skull, who tortures eddie by threatening to kill buck in front of him? or, post civil war eddie having the knowledge of his secret identity wiped from everyone's memories, only for buck to Know there's something wrong? they're all so buddie coded right out of the box.

ANYWAY god sorry i've never shut up a day in my life! y'all can't ask me about spider-man unless you're prepared for me to be the most annoying person alive god bless

[matthewfairchildfanclub]

TSC but it's incorrect quotes.

Jem: Hey, Will, what's up?

Will: Well, I'm sitting in a pool of my own blood.

Jem: Is it... your own?

Will: Oh, yeah, probably.

Jem: Where is it coming from?

Will: Probably the stab wound.

Jem: yoU'VE BEEN STABBED?!

Will: Oh, yeah definitely.

_______________________

Kit: I wrote a song called I'm Late For My Final Exam and it's just three minutes of me screaming.

_______________________

Emma: Look upon the filed which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.

_______________________

Will: Do you ever wonder how an author would describe you in a novel? Like, not only your appearance, but also your little habits and stuff. I wanna know how I'd be described.

Gabriel: Bet it would be something like "so here's this asshole."

Will: Honestly, fuck you, Gabriel.

_____________________

Kit: I mixed up Donkey Kong with King Kong and accidentally said Kinky Kong to my parents.

____________________

Izzy: Who is that weirdo on TV? He's running downtown with eight dogs.

Magnus: THAT'S MY WEIRDO

____________________

Sebastian: Be warned, I can kill you.

Jace: Be warned, I can die.

___________________

Jace: Excuse me, who made Alec the boss of the group.

Clary: You did.

Simon: You said, "Alec should be the boss."

Izzy: And then you said, "lets vote," and it was unanimous.

Magnus: And then you made him this plaque that says, "Boss of us."

Magnus: And put little sparkles all over it.

Jace:... all valid points.

____________________

Simon: What are you guys talking about? I'm like the backbone of this family.

Jace: You're more like the appendix of this family, no one knows what you're here for.

Alec: Also prone to explode at any given moment.

Jace: And a real pain to remove.

Simon: Fuck you guys.

_______________________

Emma: What's your problem?

Cristina: He keeps using common phrases incorrectly.

Kieran: Oh, cry me a table, Cristina.

________________________

Cecily: If a guy calls you "princess" in a condescending manner, assert your newly appointed royal status and have him beheaded.

_______________________

Will: I could get killed.

Will: Or even worse. Jem could give me a lecture on responsibility again.

________________________

Dru: What color are Emma's eyes?

Julian: The warm chestnut of well-worn leather when the sun comes out after days of rain.

Dru: What?

Julian: I said brown.

_________________________

Gabriel: Hello, Will, make anyone cry today?

Will: Sadly, no, but it's only 4:30.

__________________________

Will: Rubbing alcohol is for outside wounds. Drinking alcohol is for inside wounds.

Matthew: Cheers! I'll drink to that.

__________________________

James: What are you going to bring to dinner?

Matthew: My negative attitude and sparkling personality.

__________________________

Tessa: You're late.

Kit: Listen, I just spent twenty minutes in a standoff with the biggest cockroach I have ever seen, so that's where I'm at... mentally.

____________________________

Julian: I told you to stop doing that with the knives.

Dru, with knives taped to her hands: But Wolverine has-

Julian: I said stop.

____________________________

Aline: The only thing that seems to motivate you guys is pancakes.

Tavvy: Pancakes?

Ty: I love pancakes!

Dru: Do we have maple syrup?

Julian: I'll go buy some.

Emma: Where are they?

Aline: THERE ARE NO PANCAKES!

__________________________

Jace: And once again, Jace and Magnus save the day!

Alec: You didn't do anything.

Alec: It was all Magnus.

Jace: We're a package deal. Everyone knows that.

______________________________

Tessa: How can one man have so many enemies?

Will: I'm a people person who talks shit and drinks.

________________________________

Matthew: You're my best friend, but I'd fuck you if you asked.

James: What?

Matthew: What?

Lucie, from across the room: HE SAID HE'D FUCK YOU IF YOU ASKED!

_________________________________

Matthew: What if we kidnap-

James: No.

Matthew: Steal-

James: No.

Matthew: Blow up-

James: Not even a little.

Matthew: You're no fun.

________________________________

Julian: We need to distract the enemies.

Emma: Right, I can do that.

Julian: What are you going to do?

Emma: I'm gonna kill them all.

Emma: That ought to distract them.

__________________________________

Mark: I have a sword!

*two minutes later*

Mark: I have lost the sword.

_________________________________

Kit: My friendship with Dru is over.

Ty: What?

Kit: She stole my fries.

________________________________

Kit: Baking yeast has alcohol in it, but you can't get drunk off eating bread.

Kit: Trust me, I've tried.

_______________________________

Kit: I know you think my judgment is clouded because I like Ty a little bit-

Jem: You doodled your wedding invitation.

Kit: That was our joint tombstone.

Jem: My mistake.

______________________________

Clary, through the door: Are you decent?

Jace: Not morally, but I'm wearing pants if that's what you're asking.

______________________________

Kit: Ty, let's play 20 questions!

Ty: Okay, what's your favorite color.

Kit: Aces. My turn, do you like boys?

_______________________________

Julian, coming to bail the group out of jail: I hate you sometimes, you know.

Emma: Welcome to the club! You are one of 53 members. We make t-shirts and have meetings every Wednesday at 4.

Julian: What?

Mark: We would meet earlier, but Kit gets out of school at 3.

_____________________________

Jace, to Izzy and Simon at their wedding party: Alright, everyone, Saturday is the big day! A lot of us thought this day would never come. I may have been one of those people.

Izzy: I may have also been one of those people.

Simon: Wait, are we talking about our wedding?

Izzy: Yes.

Simon: Oh, yes, I was also one of those people.

____________________________

Emma: Julian and I slept together.

Cristina: And?

Emma: ... I thought you would be a little more surprised.

Cristina: Oh, sorry.

Cristina, in a shocked voice: AND?!

___________________________

Ty: The dishes aren't in alphabetical order!!!!

Kit: Excuse my language, but what the F U C K does that mean?

___________________________

Lucie: We shouldn't complain.

Matthew: I'm gonna complain anyways.

_____________________________

Dru: Kit? Are you alive? Knock once for yes, twice for no.

Kit: *pauses, then knocks twice*

Dru: What do we do? Kit's dead!

______________________________

Will: Do you know....? Do you KNOW what it's like to be AFRAID of YOURSELF?!

Tessa, thinking of all the money she blew on a scam: Geez, man, I sure do-

_____________________________

Clary: Simon, you've got a lot to offer Izzy. You're funny, you're smart-

Magnus: You're creative, you've got style...

Jace:

Magnus:

Clary:

Jace: Oh, did you want me to say something?

Jace: You have brown hair, your name is Simon.

Simon: Thanks, Jace.

_____________________________

Will: I've done a lot of dumb shit.

Tessa: I witnessed the dumb shit.

Cecily: I remember the dumb shit.

Magnus: I joined you in the dumb shit.

Jem: I tried to stop you from doing the dumb shit!

_______________________________

Jace: Okay, so-

Alec: No. Don't you dare! Stop. Stop. I don't wanna hear it. I have been cleaning up your messes for way too long and now I'm aging prematurely. You are driving me steadily insane. So I don't wanna hear it. Go away. I'll be dead next month at this rate. Leave me alone.

Jace: I was just gonna ask you if you wanted toast...

Alec: Oh, well. No thank you.

Jace: Good, because I blew up the toaster and now one of the plants is on fire.

______________________________

Kit: If you are about to be stabbed, just say, "I have too much swagger for the dagger," and they will leave you alone.

Dru: Or stab you a hundred more times.

______________________________

Will: WHO ATE MY FRIES

Will: I'M GONNA FUCKING KI-

Jem: I did.

Will:-ss you and buy you more. You haven't been eating enough.

______________________________

James: A waiter could literally murder me and I'd still tip 20%

Matthew: I would actually tip more if they murdered me, that's great customer service.

_______________________________

[rextasywrites]

Grab a bite (Lady Dimitrescu x f!Reader)

Hello! This is my first smut fic here on Tumblr. Please enjoy, I tried my very best <3 mostly smut with a hint of plot, maybe i can expand this idea??? have fun!

Warning: period blood kink! smut! don’t like don’t read please!

Find this fic on AO3

 The days in the castle hadn’t been pleasant to you...to say it in a mild way. The three vampire chicks had thrown you into the basement, up to rot along your mates. The first one to go was Mike. He had suffered from a cold before you headed into the mysterious village, and his cold soon turned into pneumonia. There wasn’t anything you could do for him apart from making sure he was as comfortable as he could be.

 The next one to go was Jasmin. In the cells you three (and a corpse) shared were quite a few rusty nails and she had the misfortune of stepping on one. Sepsis took her in less than 24 hours.

 Just a few hours ago, it was James who perished. The food given to you by the vampires was barely edible.. for humans. While you suffered from stomach aches quite a lot, James had a bigger problem. His food allergies were through the roof, and a simple dish with some nuts in it was his last meal on death row. You tried to make a tracheotomy, you really did.

 The vampires kept you in the cage for just a little bit longer. The bodies were taken away by them, but you had no chance of escaping. As you laid on the uncomfortable bed that kind of resembled a murphy bed, your mind went to everything you had left behind. Your family, your friends. All of this for a stupid job and “exploring Romania”. Fuck this shit. Were they looking for you? Were they missing you?

 Your stomach churned at all the anxieties creeping up your throat, making you choke back whatever was trying to come back up. But that wasn’t the only weird feeling in your stomach. While you didn’t know how long you had actually been in this hellhole, you knew your birth control ran out several days ago, and now your body was keen on getting its hormone household back into place.

 As if your uterus called her, one of the vampire ladies stood in front of the cell you were locked in, licking over her lips. You couldn’t tell if the darkness of her lips was from lipstick or the fact that she was a half dead monster. “Lady Dimitrescu awaits you.”, the lady said and unlocked the cage. When you first stood up, you had to press your hand against your stomach, feeling how the cramps were slowly getting worse inside of you. The lady just watched with raised eyebrows - do vampires even get periods?

 She led you through the impressive castle, and you wondered when someone cleaned in here for the last time, spiderwebs and dust were settled on nearly every surface. But boy, if it wasn’t impressive. Bigger than anything you had ever seen in your life. This sentence also was fitting for Lady Dimitrescu, who was sitting on her luxurious bed, covers of satin under her impressive...body.

 “My dear, I knew you would make it alive out of there!”, she gave you her biggest smile, and when she stood up...Jesus, she was taller than anyone you had ever seen, easily reaching 2,5 meters. Absolutely supernatural. But the thing which caught your eyes the most were her huge breasts. They were right at eye height for you, and being killed by massive tits seemed like the most pleasant death in this place. Well, at least better than dying because of a rusty nail.

 Lady Dimitrescu cupped your cheeks, feeling how the past few days had made you visibly lose weight already. “Oh my...if you want to survive the ritual, we have to nourish you. Daniela, please, get us some of the wine. I wouldn’t want my daughter to starve, would I?”

 Daniela came back with a bottle of the wine Lady Dimitrescu mentioned, pouring it into two glasses before handing you one, the other one to her...mentor? Mother? You didn’t know. Lady Dimitrescu made your two glasses click together and took a sip off the exclusive fluid, smiling as it made its way to her stomach. The taste wasn’t unpleasant, not at all. A strong taste of dry wine, but the aftertaste was slightly metallic. “You know you are allowed to speak with me.”, Lady Dimitrescu said as she put her glass on the nightstand, which had looked hilariously small in her hands. “You are part of the family now, dear. There is nothing to hide.”

 “Why me?”, was everything you managed out. Daniela had left the room by now, but that didn’t help to lessen your anxiety.

 Lady Dimitrescu chuckled and took your hand into hers, giving you the gentlest smile a vampire demon whatever the fuck she was could give. “Because you are special. The first moment my daughters spotted you in the village, I knew you’d come here. I knew you’d make it out of there alive. And now, I will prepare you for the ritual.”

 “What kind of ritual?”, the questions were clouding your mind. The last ritual you heard of was from Midsommar, and you had no interest in being burnt alive! As your hands started to shake, Lady Dimitrescu tightened her grip on them.

 “I will make you one of us. But first, you have to show me you can handle this life. That you can handle…”, she got closer to your ear as she whispered into it, “my needs.” Her needs?

 Lady Dimitrescu took the glass from your hands, putting it next to hers. Once her hands were free she placed them on your shoulders, pushing you down into the satin covers of her bed, and once you hit the sheets, your eyes felt so heavy. “Don’t fall asleep little dove!”, Lady Dimitrescu shooed, tapping her long fingers against your skin.

 “We would have started this sooner, but sadly”, Lady Dimitrescu gestured to your pants, “you have used this pill which stopped your period. And I need a good taste of you before we can continue.” What? A good taste?

 “I thought vampires drink blood!”, you bursted out, cupping your mouth once your brain realized what you just said.

 Lady Dimitrescu laughed loudly, giving your thigh a little pat. “Oh, we do, little dove. But I need to taste your innocence.” Your innocence… Her words flew around your brain while her fingers touched your bare skin from the holes in your pants. The bucket of water and the washing cloth might have helped you with feeling filthy, but it didn’t help with any ripped clothes. “It won’t hurt, I promise you. And once you have passed this test, you will be one of us in no time.”

 “...Okay?”

 “Good to hear that you agree with me, little dove!”, Lady Dimitrescu smiled, and her next move shook you to the bone. Out of the fingers of her right hand came claws, something straight out of a Wolverine movie! You froze in shock as she came closer, but instead of hurting you, all she did was slowly ripping the fabric of your clothes - or better said, what was left of them. She hummed at the sight under her, while your face became hotter and hotter. “Do not worry, dove. You will get new costumes when I am done with you. We will burn this trash you called clothes. Cheap trash.”

 Soon you were left in your undergarments, Lady Dimitrescu eyeing you up and down as if you were a piece of meat, ready for the predator to rip into its prey. And it wasn’t that wrong of a thought. In the end, you were at her mercy, but slowly her soft touch made you feel warm on the inside, spreading from your stomach, reaching all the way to your fingers and toes, a warmth you hadn’t felt in days. Was it the wine? Or was it something else?

 Lady Dimitrescu smelt old. But not an unpleasant old smelt, not this smell from nursing homes, where the rotten flesh melted into the seats of the wheelchairs. The smell of old books and knowledge, aged like the fine wine she had just given you.

 As your mind was clouded, Lady Dimitrescu continued to undress you. Your period had started by now, and a single drop of your blood fell on the satin covers under your ass. She chuckled, dipping her finger into the blood, licking it clean. “Have you ever laid with a man before, my dove?”, Lady Dimitrescu asked, to which you were ripped out of your thoughts, your reply a simple nod. You didn’t trust your voice anymore. “That’s good. You are pure. You are innocent. Just perfect for my daughters and me. Oh little dove, we are going to have so much fun together!”, Lady Dimitrescu laughed as she clapped her hands together, giving you her widest smile - and for a moment you could spot her fangs. What a weird turn on all of this was.

 Once her finger was clean, a hunger formed inside of her. Your blood...it tasted so good, so fresh, so healthy. Unlike anything she had eaten in the past 500 years - and she fucking wanted more. “Come here, little dove. Spread your legs for the Lady.”, she said as she grabbed hold of your hips, pulling your middle closer. The claws on her right hand had gone back into her skin, and at this point, you didn’t even want to ask why. At this point, all you needed was her.

 Lady Dimitrescu settled between your legs, “Let’s make this a pleasant experience for the both of us, shall we?”, she smiled as she pulled down her dress, exposing her big breasts. “I noticed your stares.”, and by the gods, they were everything you ever wanted and needed. Big, her dress had held them up, it must have been painful to her. They were saggy, but who didn’t appreciate a great pair of tits? You reached upward, your fingers sinking into the soft flesh as she chuckled. Lady Dimitrescu placed her hand on yours, letting you feel her up as you desired.

 “Come on, little dove”, she smiled after some groping from your side. She couldn’t deny, your eager massages on her breasts had left her wet and ready, but she had to prepare you. Maybe once she managed to spill a sweet orgasm from your lips, maybe then she would engage in some self centered pleasure. But right now, you were her main focus.

 Her fingers dipped a finger between your folds, scooping up your wetness mixed with blood. Lady Dimitrescu hummed in delight as she sucked her fingers clean, happiness clearly evident as she savoured the taste on her tongue. “You want to try it too?”, you shook your head in response, to which she laughed, “Oh, you will appreciate blood soon enough, little dove!”

 You couldn’t gasp when Lady Dimitrescu grabbed your hips, pulling you up against her mouth. With your legs wrapped around her shoulders, she had your pussy right in her face, taking in the sweet smell of your arousal and the metallic undertone of blood. Just how she liked it. Just how she imagined it. “Oh, having to wait for you for so many days was terrible, little dove. But now, you are mine.”, she whispered as she dove her head between your thighs, taking in more and more of you. The moment her tongue hit your folds, a loud gasp escaped your throat, surely the vampires outside of the room would hear you. Lady Dimitrescu just chuckled against your wetness, flicking her tongue over your clit as the sweet taste of your wetness spread all across her mouth.

 Her tongue was in the same proportion as her body, longer and thicker than anything you had ever seen before - or felt before. She slurped up whatever fluid she could reach, humming in delight whenever blood found its way into her mouth. The blood of a healthy and innocent virgin had been her favourite kind for so long, so hard to come by and the resulting fullness lasting for even longer. Maybe she wouldn’t turn you and keep you as her little to-go human. But where would be the fun in that?

 As much as you wished she’d use her fingers too, it was like Lady Dimitrescu was reading your mind. “No penetration for you, little dove. You need to stay pure, untouched.”, but eating your pussy out was fine? Well, you had to play by her rules, not yours. You relaxed further in her grip as Lady Dimitrescu refreshed herself on you, feeling hundreds of years younger.

 Your orgasm came crashing down on you, unexpected but with a force you had never felt before. While you groaned and trashed under Lady Dimitrescu’s grip, she kept her lips on your pussy, taking in all the juices she could get her mouth on, the hint of blood making her moan in delight.

 The next thing you know is that the pain in your abdomen had stopped and Lady Dimitrescu had put clothes on your. You rubbed your eyes, blinking as you made sense of what had happened while you were out. The clothes on your body were dark and silky, just like the dress of Daniela before. The hunger inside of you was burning your stomach down, but it wasn’t just a simple hunger.

 You were lusting for blood. Well, time to find Lady Dimitrescu and tell her about the little changes in your body...

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 10/1/21: VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE, THE ADDAMS FAMILY II, THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK, TITANE, MAYDAY, THE JESUS MUSIC

Yeah, so I haven’t had the time over the past couple weeks to write a column, and I kind of hate that fact, especially since I’m coming up on a pretty major milestone for me writing a weekly box office column and reviewing movies. In fact, that milestone comes next week! And once again, I’m struggling to get through the movies I was hoping to watch and write about this week, because I’ve been out of town and once again, very busy over the weekend. Let’s see how far I get...

Before we get to this week’s wide releases, I’m excited to say that my local arthouse movie theater, The Metrograph, is finally reopening for in-person screenings, and they’re kicking things off with a 4k restoration of Andrez Zulawski’s 1981 thriller, Possession, starring Sam Neill and Isabell Adjani, who won a Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance in the film. I actually saw this at the Metrograph a few years back, and Metrograph Pictures, the distribution arm of the company is now distributing the 4k restoration. There’s a lot of exciting things ahead at Metrograph, including an upcoming four-film Clint Eastwood retrospective, including White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) and A Perfect World (1991) this Friday. Also, Lingua Franca director Isabel Sandoval will be showing her fantastic film from 2020 (a rare chance to see it in a theater and I’ll be there!) as well as program a number of other favorites of hers. Sunday will have screenings of Ingmar Berman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) in its full four plus hour glory, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994).. In other words, the Metrograph is back!

Moving over to the weekend’s three wide releases, the first one up being Sony’s VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE (Sony Pictures) with Tom Hardy returning as Eddie Brock aka Venom, joined by Woody Harrelson as the psychotic symbiote, Carnage. Taking over the directing reins is Andy Serkis, who has only directed two other movies, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle and Breathe, but as an actor, he’s been heavily involved with the CG VFX (and performance capture) needed to bring the characters in this Marvel anti-hero movie to life.

Venom has been one of Spider-Man’s most popular villains and sometimes allies for quite a few decades now, starting out life as a cool black costume Spider-Man found on a strange planet during the first “Secret Wars,” which turned out to be an alien symbiote that had malicious intentions. Spider-Man got the costume off of him but it then linked up with Eddie Brock, a sad-sack journalist whose emotions drove the alien symbiote to become the Venom we known and (mostly) love, thanks to one Todd McFarlane. Venom continued to play a large part in the Spider-Man books before getting his own comics, and not before a super-villain was created for him in Cletus Kasady, a vicious serial killer whose infection by the symbiote turns him into Carnage. And that’s who Harrelson is playing.

Being a sequel, we do have some basis to go on, although the original Venom movie, released in early October 2018, also arrived at a time when it was only the second time the character of Venom was brought to the big screen -- the first time being Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, in which the character was received without much love as Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And yet, Venom did great, opening with $80.2 million and grossing $213 million domestically, which is more than enough to greenlight a sequel. (It made over double that amount overseas, too.) For comparison, the Wolverine prequel opened with $85 million but at the beginning of summer, so it quickly tailed away with other movies coming out after it. Venom: Let There Be Carnage has to worry about the new James Bond opening a week later, so it very likely could be a one-and-done, opening decently but quickly dropping down as other big movies are released in October (basically one a week).

I’ve already seen the movie, and by the time you read this, reviews will already be up --including my own at Below the Line. Social media reactions seem to not be so bad though, so maybe it’ll get better reviews than its predecessor, which was trashed by critics, receiving only a 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But if you look at the fan ratings, they’re higher with 81%, although it’s hard not to be

I’m thinking that bearing COVID in mind and the law of depreciation since the previous movie, Venom: Let There Be Carnage will probably be good for around $50 million this weekend, maybe a little more, but however it’s received, I expect it to drop significantly next week, though a total domestic gross of $135 to 140 million seems reasonable.

Another strong sequel to kick off October is the animated THE ADDAMS FAMILY II (MGM), which is following up the 2019 hit for MGM/UA Releasing with most of the voice cast returning, including Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Finn Wolfhard, as well as Nick Kroll, Snoop Dogg, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, and Bette Midler voicing the popular characters from the New Yorker cartoons, a popular ‘60s TV series, and two Barry Sonnenfeld movies from the ‘90s.

The 2019 animated film was a pretty solid hit for the newly-launched UA Releasing, grossing $100 million domestic after a $30.3 million opening, making it one of MGM’s biggest hits since it was restructured under UA and became its own distributor again. Who knows what’s going to happen with Amazon’s plans on buying MGM and whether the latter will remain a distribution wing, but MGM still has a number of movies out this year that likely will be awards contenders. But that doesn’t mean much for The Addams Family II, which will try to get some of those people who paid to see the original movie in theaters back to see the sequel… and if they’re not going to theaters, MGM is once again offering the movie day-and-date on VOD much like they did with last year’s Bill and Ted Face the Music, which opened much earlier in the pandemic (late august, 2020), so it far fewer options to see it in theaters compared to this animated sequel.

It’s highly doubtful that The Addams Family II was going to open anywhere near to $30 million even if there wasn’t a pandemic, and it wasn’t on VOD just because MGM just doesn’t seem to be marketing the movie as well as its predecessor. You can blame COVID if you want, but it’s also the fact they’re distributing the company’s first James Bond movie in six years, No Time To Die, on their own vs. through another distributor, ala the last few Daniel Craig Bonds. But we’ll talk more about that next week, since that’s going to be an important movie to help cover MGM’s expenses for the rest of 2021. (I haven’t had a chance to see this yet, but it’s embargoed until Friday, so wouldn’t be able to get a review into the column regardless.)

We’ve seen quite a few family hits over the past few months even when the movies were already on streaming/VOD, but parents are probably being a bit more careful with kids back in school, many younger kids still not vaccinated, and the Delta variant still not quite under control. Because of those factors, I think The Addams Family II is more likely to do somewhere between $15 and 18 million its opening weekend, maybe more on the lower side.

Third up is THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK (New Line/WB), David Chase’s prequel to his hit HBO series, The Sopranos, which went off the air in 2004 but still finds fans on the new HBO Max streamer. Ironically, this prequel will air on the streamer at the same time as it's getting a theatrical release, which probably won't be a very tough choice for fans.

Chase has reunited with director Alan Taylor, who won a Primetime Emmy for his work on the show in 2007 before moving onto other popular shows like HBO's Game of Thrones. Taylor has had a bit of a rough career in film, though, having directed Marvel Studios’ sequel, Thor: The Dark World, a movie that wasn't received very well although there were rumors that Taylor butted heads with the producers and maybe didn't even finish the movie. He went on to direct Terminator Genesys, which honestly, I can't remember if it was the worst Terminator movie, but it was pretty bad.

What's interesting is that because this is a prequel set in the '70s and '80s, none of the actors from the show appear on it, but it does star Alessandro Nivola, a great actor in one of his meatiest roles for a studio movie. It also introduces Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini (who played Tony Soprano, if you didn't know), playing the teenage Tony, plus it has great roles for the likes of Jon Bernthal (as Tony's father), Vera Farmiga (playing Tony's mother), Corey Stoll (playing the younger "Junior” Soprano), and Lesile Odom Jr, as the Sopranos key adversary, even though he ends up coming across like the good guy of the movie. It also stars Billy Magnussen, who oddly, also has a key role in next week's No Time to Die.

I'm sure there's quite a bit of interest in seeing where Tony came from and to learn more about his family, many who were dead long before the events of the HBO show, but will that be enough to get them into theaters when they already have HBO? I already reviewed the movie for Below the Line, and reviews are generally positive, which might get people more interested in this prequel.

As with most of Warner Bros’ movies this year, Many Saints will also debut on HBO Max and unlike some of the studio’s other 2021 offerings, it will actually make more sense to watch this one on the streamer since that’s how most people watched The Sopranos. That seems like a killer for Many Saints, and it’s likely to keep it opening under $10 million, where it might have done better on a different weekend (like sometime over the last two weeks).

This is what I have this weekend’s top 10 looking like:

1. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Sony) - $50.4 million N/A

2. The Addams Family II (MGM/UA Releasing) - $16.5 million N/A

3. The Many Saints of Newark (New Line/WB) - $9 million N/A

4. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Marvel/Disney) - $7.5 million -44%

5. Dear Evan Hansen (Universal) - $4.1 million -45%

6. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $3.3 million -30%

7. Jungle Cruise (Disney) - $1.1 million -35%

8. Candyman (Universal) - $1.3 million -48%

9. Cry Macho (Warner Bros.) - $1 million -52%

10. Malignant (Warner Bros.) - .7 million -53%

Opening in select cities is French filmmaker Julia (Raw) Ducournau’s TITANE (Neon), the genre thriller that won this year’s coveted Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It stars Agathe Rouselle as a young woman who has an interesting relationship with automobiles, but she also has psychotic tendencies that leaves a trail of bodies behind her. On the run, she decides to pretend she’s the missing son of a fireman (Vincent Lindon), who has been missing for 10 years, and things just get weirder from there.

I honestly wasen’t sure what to expect from this although I do remember walking out of Ducournau’s cannibal movie, Raw, just because it was so gross, even though so many of my colleagues and friends swear by the movie, and this one, for that matter. Sure, there’s a certain “prove it” factor to me watching a movie that wins the Palme D’Or, because it’s very rare that I like the movies that do win that benchmark cinema award.

After a flashback to Agathe’s character Alexia when she was an obstinate young girl kicking the back seat of her father as he’s driving. They crash and she’s forced to get surgery that puts an odd looking piece of metal in her head. Decades later, she seems to be a pseudo-stripper at weird punk rock car show -- I guess they do those things different in France -- and hooking up with a fellow “model” afterwards. Agathe is actually a very popular model/dancer but when one fan gets too grabby, she pulls a knitting needle out of her hair and stabs it through his ear, killing him. Oh, yeah, she then has sex with a car and seemingly gets pregnant, but that only happens later. First, she goes on a bit of a killing spree and then goes on a run and decides that by strapping up her breasts and breaking her nose, she can pass off this fire captain’s son… and it works!

So the second half deals with acting great Vincent Lindon’s absolutely bonkers steroid-addicted man who seems to be sexually attracted to his own son, and most of his fellow firefighters knows that he’s gay but in the closet, but I’m honestly not sure what that matters. He’s a pretty disgusting character whose 70-year-old ass we see way too much of, and even those who might find Rouselle to be quite fetching, there’s a certain point where her nudity is not alluring but quite horrifying.

Oh, and at this time, Alexia (or Adrien, as she’s now going) has also gotten significantly pregnant, but it’s not a normal pregnancy because what should be milk from her breasts seems to some sort of motor oil. That’s because she FUCKED A CAR earlier in the movie!!! What do you expect when you fuck a car and don’t use protection, girlie? The fact Alexia/Adrien is trying to hide the fact she’s a pregnant woman from a station full of men isn’t even particularly disturbing. The part that really got me was when she broke her own nose to pass off as this guy’s son -- I actually had to look away for that part.

Listen I’m no prude, and I think I can handle most things in terms of horror and gore, but Titane just annoyed me, because it felt like Ms Ducournau was doing a lot of what we see more for shock value than to actually drive the story forward. There just doesn’t seem to be much point to any of it, and once the movie gets to the firehouse, and we see her interaction (as a young man) with her “father” and his colleagues, it just gets more grueling.

It’s as if Ducournau had watched a lot of movies by the likes of Cronenberg or David Lynch, or more likely Nicolas Refn or Lars von Trier, and thought, “I could be just as strange and horrific as those men… let’s see what people think of this.” And way too many people fell for it, including the Cannes jury. While I normally would approve of any good body horror movie, especially one with cinematography, score and musical selections as good as this one, I doubt I’d ever want to watch this movie again. And therefore, I don’t think I can recommend this movie to anyone either, at least no one I want to remain my friend.

As far as the movie’s box office, NEON is opening the movie in 562 theaters to build on buzz from various film festivals, including the New York Film Festival earlier this week. I think it should be good for half a million this weekend, although maybe it'll surprise me like NEON's release of Parasite a few years back. I just don't see this getting into the top 10 but maybe just outside it.

And then we have a few more movies that I got screeners for but just couldn’t find the time to watch, but might do so once I finish this verdammt column.

The faith-based doc THE JESUS MUSIC (Lionsgate) by the Erwin Brothers (I Can Only Imagine, I Still Believe) takes a look at the rise of Christian Contemporary Music through artists like Amy Grant and Stryper and everything in between, featuring lots of interviews of the artists’ trials and triumphs. Even though there isn’t much CCM I ever listen to, I’m still kind of curious about this one, since I generally like music docs and this is guaranteed not to be the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll of most of them. I have no idea how wide Lionsgate intends to release this but it certainly can be fairly wide, because the Erwins have delivered at least one giant hit for Lionsgate, and I Still Believe may have been another one if not for the pandemic. It actually opened on March 13, just days before movie theaters shut down across the country, so it's little surprise it only made $7 million domestic. That said, the acts in this one have a lot of fans, and if Lionsgate does release The Jesus Music into 1,000 theaters or so (which is very doable), then I would expect it would make between $1 and 2 million, which would be enough to break into the Top 10.

I haven't seen any of the movies based on Anna Todd's YA romance novels but the third of them, AFTER WE FELL, will play in about 1,311 theaters on Thursday i.e. tonight through Fathom Events, and may or may not continue through the weekend. These movies just kind of show up, and again, having not seen any of them, I'm not sure what kind of audience they have, but this one stars Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes, as well as Stephen Moyer, Mira Sorvino and Arielle Kebbel with Castille Landon directing.

Grace Van Patten (Under the Silver Lake) stars in Karen Cinorre’s action-fantasy film MAYDAY (Magnolia), playing Ana, a young woman who is transported to a “dreamlike and dangerous” coastline where she joins a female army in a never-ending war where women lure men to their deaths. It also stars Mia Goth, Havana Rose Liu, Soko, Théodore Pellerin and Juliette Lewis. It will be in theaters and On Demand this Friday.

The great Tim Blake Nelson stars in Potsy Ponciroli’s action-Western OLD HENRY (Shout! Studios/Hideout) about a widowed farmer and son who take in an injured man with a satchel full of cash only to have to fend off a posse who come after the man, claiming to be the law. Not sure who to trust, the farmer has to use his gun skills to defend his home and the stranger.

The romantic-comedy FALLING FOR FIGARO (IFC Films) is the new movie from Australian filmmaker Ben Lewin (The Sessions), who I’ve interviewed a few times, and he’s a really nice chap. This one stars Danielle Macdonald, Hugh Skinner, and Joanna Lumley, and it will be in theaters and On Demand this Friday. This rom-com is set in the world of opera singing competitions with Macdonald playing Millie, a brilliant young fund manager who decides to chase her dream of being an opera singer in the Scottish Highlands. She begins vocal training lessons with a former opera diva, played by Lumley, where she meets Max, a young man also training for that competition. Could love blossom? This actually sounds like my kind of movie, so I’ll definitely try to watch soon.

The second season of “Welcome to Blumhouse” the horror movie anthology kicks off on Amazon Prime Video on Friday with the first two movies, Maritte Lee Go’s Black as Night (which I’ve seen) and Gigi Saul Guerrero’s Bingo Night (which I haven’t), and actually I’ll have an interview with Ms. Go over at Below the Line possibly later this week. The former stars Ashja Cooper as a teen girl living in Louisiana who has a bad experience with homeless vampires, along with her best friend (Fabrizio Guido).

Also, Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal’s remake of the Danish film THE GUILTY will begin streaming on Netflix starting Friday after premiering at TIFF a few weeks back. I never got around to reviewing it, but it’s pretty good, maybe a little better than the original movie but essentially the same. I’d definitely recommend it if you like Jake, because he’s definitely terrific in it.

Also hitting Netflix this week is Juana Macias' SOUNDS LIKE LOVE (Netflix), a Spanish language romance movie that (guess) I haven't seen!

A few other movies I didn’t get to this week, include:

STOP AND GO (Decal) VAL (Dread) BLUSH (UA Releasing) RUNT (1091 Pictures)

Next week, it’s not time for James Bond, it’s time for James Bond to die… no, wait… there is NO TIME TO DIE! Also, a very, very special anniversary for the Weekend Warrior….

[popculturebuffet]

New X-Men Xtrospective Part 2: Germ Free Generation (Annual, #117-120)

Hello all you happy mutants! And welcome back to my look one of my faviorite runs of one of my faviorite super teams by one of my faviorite comic book writers!

For those of you just joining us.. it’s been a while. I did the first instalment of this retrospective back in early January as a present to my friend for christmas, as he had never read E is for Extinctoin and what with this run being vital to the current, utterly brilliant Krakoa era of X-Men. But with both Black History Month and Valentine’s day, February had no real room for this one and march ended up being just as crammed with me doing essentially the entire della arc of ducktales in one month. I didn’t mean for this retrospective to get pushed so far back, but since I gave up doing weekly coverage of Final Space I had some room on the schedule so this retrospective is back with a vengance with two entries this month and hopefully at least one a month afterword to keep it at a decent clip. 

Last time I covered the background of this run and didn’t really find much for the issues after, so I won’t have to spend as much time on background. 

So since i’ts been a few months, a refresher is probably in order

PREVIOUSLY, ON X-MEN:  Our merry mutants enterted a marvelous new era. As Charles redidciated to the dream with new equipment and a new uniforms our hero encounter a new villian: The Mysterious Cassandra Nova, a powerful telepath who used an uwitting patsy from the trask family and a defucnt sentinel factory to slaughter the mutant nation of Genosha, killing 16 million mutants in the most horrific act of genocide against mutants ever known. And the fact there has been more than one genocide against mutant kind MIGHT, just MIGHT be the reason they blackmailed for peace with life saving drugs instead of helping willingly and freely in the current comics. Just maybe. 

Cassandra was captured by the X-Men soon after but escaped and nearly got a hold of Cerebra only to be stopped thanks to a combination of former enemy, genoshan resident at the time of the genocide, and that bitch Emma Frost who snapped her neck and Charles himself who uncharacteristically shot Cassandra in the head. That night Charles took a bold step over that would change the X-Men forever and told the world on live tv:

While all of this was going on we got caught up on the team’s personal struggles, currently consisting of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast and Wolverine with Emma joining as of the issue we’re about to cover. Beast is grappling with a secondary mutation that makes him look like Aslan, the jesus of narnia and all lions. Meanwhile Scott and Jean are grappling with their non existant sex life as Cyclops possesion by Apocalypse shortly before this story has severely rattled him and caused him to close himself off emotionally. 

So that’s where we pick up. Our heroes are now no longer hiden saftely in the shadows from a world that hates and fear them but are out front and center with the world watching. And we’ll see both how that helps their cause and how it puts them directly in the cross hairs under the cut.  Content Warning: This review discusses Transphobia and a scene involving a school shooting. If either of these are a trigger for you or something you do not want to read about  please skip this part of the retrospective for your own well being. Thank you and have a lovely day. 

The Man From Room X:

We have three stories today: an annual that introduces our final team member and the main villians of our next arc, a one off that moves the main plot for the first 12 issues along, and a three part arc about said villains.  Before we get into the Annual, I have to talk about it’s weird gimmick: The issue is entirely sideways. I don’t mean it’s bad though some parts are problematic I mean when bought it’d be on it’s side and in my trade I have to flip the whole thing over on it’s side to read it. It’s just a .. weird choice. Not the weirdest thing about this issue somehow but not unexpected from Grant as they like to play with the formula. 

We open in said Room X, a location in China where a mutant named Xorn is kept and showed off to a mysterious group of dickweeds in suits representing “Mr. Sublime”.  His jailer, General Aao Jun,, shows him off as most bad guys would : By undoing his helmet and thus disntegrating two innocent children just by looking at them. Sublime says they have a deal. 

Meanwhile also in China the X-Men are there for a funeral and Emma and Scott trade insulting questions back in forth: She mocks him about his lack of sex with Jean lately and he brings up her criminal past. As for why Emma’s still with the x-men.. it’s out of pragmatisim. WIth Genosha gone, the x-men are the saftest faction to throw in with. 

As for why the X-Men are in China, Charles has rapidly expanded his operations now he’s public by setting up X-Corps, a multinational humantarian aid organization dedicated to helping mutants in need wherever they sprout up. He’s set up offices in Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Mumbai and Melborne. 

He’s also half assed it, at least for the Hong Kong office and only gave them two employees: Domino, who those of you not as familiar with the comics may remember from deadpool and Risque.. who I honestly had never heard of before New X-Men and frequently forget existed. I just looked her up for the first time and she’s a minor mutant who was an associate of X-Force and Warpath’s love intrest. She could compress matter causing it to implode. My assumption here is that Morrison simply picked a minor mutant at random for the job. 

But yeah naturally with only two mutants charged with, according to domino “All of asia” went horribly and the x-men are there for Risque’s funeral and to find out what happened. Unsuprisingly it’s tied into our cold open: Risque had found evidence of a mutant trafficking operation and died fighting them off and Dom is naturally f eeling in over her head since said operation involves the chinese goverment, who according to her exccute most mutants at birth and John Sublime and his cult. 

We soon see a press confrence from this asshole and find out what his deal is: Sublime is the head of the U-Men, a group that belivies they are a “third species” of mutants trapped in human bodies that deserve to have the surgery to make them into mutants, and thus wear weird suits until the world is pure and allows them to have surgery for it. 

Yeahhhh this.. this is really fucking uncomfortable and is going to be present throughout today’s piece so let’s just go ahead and rip that band-aid off:  The U-Men come off as HIGHLY transphobic. They use terms similar to trans people call themselves trans species and are trapped inside a body they don’t belong in. It’s VERY uncomfortable to read as a result and something that hadn’t really sunk into till thsi reading but once it had.. oh god does this not age well. 

The one thing that keeps this from runing the run and Grant Morrison as a whole for me.. is that I do not think for one second it was intentional. Grant themself is genderqueer, nonbinary and a cross dresser. None of this means they CAN’T be prejudice, being Queer does not magically make you immune to being prejudiced. But before this Grant had the genderqueer sentient street Danny the Street over in doom patrol and a trans main character in his book the invisibles, Lord Fanny. And given New X-Men’s biggest flaw as a whole is clumsy early 2000′s unforutnate implications such as a good chunk of the things about Cyclops affair with Emma, we’ll get to that at the right time, Angel in the next arc and Dust, who was introduced as from afganastan wearing an outfit not seen in the country and speaking a language not spoken in the country. Grant didn’t make these mistakes TWICE, it’s why I still have respect for them, and this won’t be the first or last comic i’ve forgiven for being stupid for it’s time. But I will still call Grant out when I see it. Just because I respect an author just because they changed my life does not mean I won’t call them out when they fuck up. And if they prove to be truly vile, have harmed someone or what have you I will cut them the fuck out of my life. I’ve done it with JK Rowling, Warren Ellis, Brad Jones and Joss Whedon. I would do it with Grant if I truly belivied they were transphobic and instead didn’t just write something very stupid without thinking the metaphor through 20 years ago. 

So anyway back to the comic book bollocks as Wolvie and Dominio prepare for an infiltration and flirt a bunch. We also find out Jun is a mutant himself with a power only Grant could dream up: his skin, hair and what have you that falls off him turns into a naked golem for a bit before expiring. And if you hadn’t read this issue before reading this review, yes that actually happened. While the first arc had a BIT of Grant’s trademark batshit insanity, the series REALLY starts to pick it up from here: This issue has a mutant with functioning star for a head, a poorly thought out bucnh of sci fi new age organ theives, and a general whose power is “makes naked clones out of his dandruff”. Oh and his fondest wish?

I just... I don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t know how you respond to an old man’s weird murder fetish that he tells a somehow even creepier cult leader while said cult leader is paying him to buy a star man, and their both surronded by the creepy old guy’s skin golems that weirdly look like mudokons. Look i’ve  read Grant’s entire utterly bonkers run on doom patrol. I’ve seen a man who looks like a question mark use a bicycle that makes everyone high like their on LSD for president. And THIS is what breaks me. 

So while.. THIS is going on, Dom and Wolverine plan to do it all night long on the professor’s credit card, no really he gives all his professors carte blanch to use school fun, and inflitrate, Dom through the elvator this horrorshow just took place in and Wolvie james bond style. Also I gotta say I REALLY love how Morrison writes Domino. She’s wittiy, entertaining and her power is as awesome as always, super luck if you didn’t know. It’s a real shame he didn’t add her to the team: She wasn’t on any other x-teams, with X-Force having been rebranded into X-Statix by this point. She would’ve been a fun addition to the cast. 

Naturally wolverine is found out.. but that was the entire plan, for him to serve as a distraction then cut his way to domino while she steals something from the vault. As for the rest of the X-Men, Cyclops, Beast and Emma are all downstairs in the parking garage and find a secret entrance. Jean is not on this trip and that’s a major plot point for this run. This is where Risque died.. and it only get’s worse when Hank goes inside, finding a bug like child, basically htink a giant caterpillar but with tons of human arms inttead of legs with her wings cut off. 

Thankfully as Logan and Dom escape above, the U-Men are dumb enough to storm down bellow.. and while they incapacitate beast with some launched tiny knives, designed to incapcicate but leave them in tact for harvest, Emma beats the shit out of them and get the info out as only she can....

Granted she could’ve just turned back to normal and used her telepathy.. but what fun would that be? Plus they have blockers and you know CUT UP A FUCKING CHILD. SO yeah fuck them, let emma have her fun. 

Thanks to her they find out the U-Men are a front for illegal organ harvest, and while they can’t prove sublimes attached Emma suggests killing him.  Good idea but Scott suggests the lighter approach and we find out what Dom stole, a key, something Emma can psychcially scan. She warns it might take her a bit to get something.. only to be flooded instantly and we find out who the man in the box was. Shen Xorn... i’ll let emma tell you more herself. 

It’s stuff like this why, despite some serious flaws like the U-Men debacle and some stuff to come, some I mentioned above other that’s just with the plot that i love this run. Morrison just gets how to really tell an x-men story and the real tragedy of being a mutant. That just for being diffrent, you get shut out, or in this case thrown into a box when you could’ve and should’ve been something more. As emma turns herself to diamond to deal with the psychic backlash, Beast has some solemn words to share. 

That night Scott rests in his bedroom while presumibly hearing some truly horrific and sexy things next door while talking to jean before clocking out.. only for Emma to head in in a sexy dress with champagne. What happened? Well we won’t know for sure for most of the run. 

The next day the U-Men prepare to load and we get some scrap of what the idea was supposed to be: John talks to Ao Jun about his procedures. We see wings crudely sewen to his back and his throat implaants hurting “But one day I will fly”. THe IDEA is their supposed to be lunatics, people who envy mutantkind but don’t actually respect their culture or their sense of personhood. It’s not the worst idea and had Grant not used trans termnology for htis, it would’ve been a great one. I think he INTENDED for them to be coopting the idea of being trans and what not to maks their true intentions.. which is problematic due to debates like the ones on bathrooms where a lot of transphobic asshats make the bad faith argument a bunch of people are going to pretend to be trans to assault people. 

We’re.. we;’re not even to the main storyarc yet. 

But things soon go wrong as Xorn’s starhead starts to collapse into a black hole, with no solution as the x-men took the key to his helmet.. and assault the compound. Turns out the star collapse thing is Jun’s revenge on humanity for lockig him down here and he gets his neck snapped.  Scott has a solution though.. and it’s stuff like this why I fucking love Scott Summers and get annoyed when people call him “boring”: He realizes Xorn is comitting sucicide.. so he’s going to talk him out of it. Not just for everyone else but he deserves to live. And while Emma points out only logan among htem knows chinese and she can’t get through to Xorns’ head due to the way his brain works, Scott has a simple workaround: Use the nearest chineses speaker to teach Scott chinese. So.. with that he talks to Xorn. 

And that my friend is Scott Summers. A man who faced with powerful man whose given up, whose lost all hope... convinces him he can still go on. That living’s better than dying.. and that it does get better. The issue closes with Xorn basking in the sunlight for the first time in decades while Domino sweats having an extremley powerful unknown mutant out in the world. Scott’s already thought of that.. and signed him up with the x-men. Granted it won’t be until our next article that he actually fully joins the team, but w’ell get to that next time. 

This issue is great... while the U-Men stuff is pretty bad and isn’t going to get better, the tale of xorn is excitiong, Aao Jun is an intresting antagonist and the sideways gimmick suprisingly works. So now we’ve finshed our apitizer let’s get on to the main course. 

Danger Rooms:

We open in well.. the Danger Room with Beast training a new student. 

This is Beak. Beak is my faviorite character Morrison came up with and one of my faviorite X-Characters. Beak is a bird like boy who can fly, it’s just a struggle and due to looking diffrent and not having the most impressive power has very low self esteem. It’s also part of something Morrison took a concerted effort to do: introduce more mutants with genuinely odd apperances and drawbacks. Like we saw with Ugly John last time and Aao Jun in the previous issue, Morriosn really likes adding weird mutants but he also uses it to give a genuine downside to being one. While this isn’t NEW to x-men, Morriosn upped the scale and number of characters like this with weird powers and apperances. We see a bunch of human passing ones too but the backgrounds just jammed with all sorts of unique designs and students. It’s also the point where the school became far more crowded like the movies, a good call on my part both to help those coming in from the movies, and to help sell the mutant baby boom going on. After all it wouldn’t make sense if the school was just about 5-7 students and a bunch of grown adults doing superhero stuff like usual would it.

But we get to see that Hank is a good teacher, as he reminds the boy that he’s getting better and won’t be an x-man overnight, and worries about him to the professor, wanting the boy not to slip through the cracks, figuratively, and not to feel like an outcast.. especaily here. But Hank dosen’t feel blue for long, metaphorically he was blue long before he became the lion minus the witch and the wardrobe, as he has a date to night.. and so does Charles. 

Or rather he did.. his girlfriend trish, a long time love intrest of his and a reporter.. breaks up with him. Over voice mail. While in washington. And the reasons she gives are not great

Yes Hank’s transformation is radical.. but not only was it not his choice... she’s being a coward, sending the message it’s okay to dump someone because hteir a mutant or because they happen tobe diffrent and that efffects your career. Again it’s moments like this that make the run soar over the more awkward bits. 

Meanwhile Logan’s off doing logan stuff, i.e. gazing at a deer. Wow. Jean followed him. Both notice a space ship: Despite recently outing himself as a mutant, leading to an increased number of students and a bunch of rioting morons at the gates, Charles has decided NOW’S a good time to take a vacation to the Shiar empire. As for why Jean’s really out here, her marriage to Scott isn’t doing so good and while Logan encourages her to stay it’s just not that simple: Her telekenisis is coming back, stronger than ever. She feels the most alive she’s been while he’s shutting her out and feeling his deadest. She tries to turn to logan for comfort but he shuts her down. Just wait two decades jean... he’ll open up to a threesome. In all seriousness though having Jean try and come onto Logan .. will backfire slightly on later storylines. But we’ll get to that eventually. 

In the basement Hank is studying Cassandra or rather a virtual version of her since her body is naturally in storage. And he’s found out something disturbing: She’s Charles Genetic Twin.. oh and it gets way worse. The Professor’s weird behavior? Barely staffing the hong kong office, leaving suddenly with rioters t the gates, outing himself? About that...

Cassandra tourtures Hank with the possiblity he’s devovling and then tries to mind controlli him into cleaning himself with his diploma when Beak enters. The good news is this allows hank to shake off her control and tackle her, showing off why hank mccoy is fucking awesome in the process. 

That is the Hank McCoy I know, love.. and miss dearly. The one we’ll probably never get back sadly after what others did and what Percy’s had to do to reconclie with all they did. 

Unfortunately beak being around means cassandra can force him to beat beast into a coma with his bat. She plans to tear Charles dream down around him and make him watch.. and cryptically says he tried to kill her. She then cheerfully leaves Jean in charge.. and talks about just how much damage one could do with an entire interstellar empire in the wrong hands....

This issue is also excellent and sets up the next two arcs nicely while giving us a nice peak in hank’s head. Great stuff. The artist also hid the word sex in a lot of the images see if you can find them. 

Germ Free Generation Issue 1: 

So now we get into our main story for today. This story and the one before it were drawn by Ethan Van Sciver whose a talented artist.. but also highly contrversial for being a conservative. I myself.. don’t know what he’s said or did, though calling himself “Canceld Superstar’ on twitter really isn’t a good sign. So I really can’t comment on it but I also know someone would mention it if I didn’t bring it up and if you know what he did please enlighten me. 

So we open with a school shooter who also scooped out a guys eyes and is part of the U-Men. He get shot by the swat team while making his speech> it’s an effective opening but one that’s become more uncomfortable to read with each passing day due to school shootings going up and up in number. And mass shootings in general and I... I need a second. I need something to relax me

Thank you Stoopy. Your doing Odd’s Work. 

So the news reports on this and we soon see how Jean watches the news.. by using Cerebra to read the minds of every person on the planet. Neat. Everyone’s talking about them. We also get a hint for later as we hear on the suicide of one martha johanson who wrote the note in her own blood. She’ll be important later.... and I mean that both in the context of this retrospective and for the fact she’ll go on to be part of x-men in perpetuity. 

This is also where another great concept of Morrison’s pops up: Mutant culture. After all mutants are a minority, they should have their own culture. It’s something Hickman’s era has taken and ran with, but it’s a damn good idea and one that it shoudln’t of taken almost 20 years for someone else to use given Decimation was undone way back around 2012 in Avengers Vs X-Men, aka that event half hte articles on the mcu around the fox sale used as either their image for the article or asked about happneing. And yes that is a pet peeve of mine: while I do think like Civil War AVX could use a movie version to make it better, I don’t think it’s an event that could be done right away and would have to be almost entirely redone anyway given the context for AvX is entirely couched in decimation i.e. something NO ONE wants in any x-adaptation. 

So it turns out while watching the news in a next level way Jean is also talking to Logan. “Stay out of my personal fantasies”. Yeah I .. I don’t think your ready for a hairy canadian dry humping a transformer.. specifically killbison. And yes.. that is an actual transformer and why yes, I have been waiting to bring him up. 

And he is , and I am not making any of this up, part of a group of decpticons known as the breastforce. Your life is better for knowing that and you are welcome. 

Anyway as you’d imagine a genocidal old woman in her brothers’ body leaving the X-Men to fend for themselves after having a teenager bludgeon one into a coma after publicly outing them with a rabid bunch of bigoted morons at the gates has not gone great. Henry is still out and despite the short staffing Jean needs logan to stay where he is as he’s close to an emerging mutant and within range to go get her. 

Emma of course has never been so fucking irate in her whole life and is plotting various forms of psychic tourture with the help of her proteges the Stepford Cucokoo, 5 teenage mutants who functoin best as a unit and are easily some of MOrrison’s most prominent additions to the x-cast. Unlike a lot of the x-kids, they’ve been featured prominently in every era of x-men after this including the current one. 

Jean decides for a less “Make them hate us even more” approach, but no less pissed off, opening the gates and going out directly to chew out the assembled bigoted morons, pointing out the ones carrying “Mutants Go Home!” signs are especailly dumb as this IS her home. And while she dosen’t point this part out, it’ the same for all of them: most of the mutants are either adults who choose to live here, teenagers who along with their parents choose to live here, or in the majority teens who have no where else to go due to either being abandoned by their families or it being way to dangerous for said families for them to stay due to bigoted assholes like the ones holding mutants go home signs. 

A member of the press asks if she’s willing to talk to the media and she refutes most of his bullshit allegations: He asks if their building an army, she and Scott respond they are not and are simply educating mutants and protecting them. When he counters with the fact their living weapons and wearing uniforms... she counters with the fact she’s wearing them to protect herself, rightfully, from people like her, and the x-men are an aid orginzation going where needed to protect the world and while asshole points out no one apointed them.. jean shuts him down by pointing out there are no mutants in goverment and a genocide just happened, so someone has to do the job. Another random asshole tries to pipe up with “Genosha declared war on us” and Emma senses this is just going to go round and round and round and simply presses the assembled mob’s “bliss buttons” in their brains to knock them out. Non violent but honestly warranted: A dangerous part of bigoted assholes is they’l bring up racist bullshit to try and couch it like an actual conversation. None of these complaints really hold water if you looked at the x-men’s history for more than 5 minutes. Yes Charles is training them to fight and yes hte ingial class was an army but every class since has only been trained for self defense: they still got into adventures and what not, but it was usually by their own choice or because they were thrust into them by circumstance. Xaviers is exactly what jean said and endudgling these morons, while good on paper, only makes them seem legit. 

Jean retreats to the infirmary where she’s on the verge of breaking down from the sheer weight of everything. Cyclops proves that despite not being the best husband right now... he still loves his wife, offering to go look into Sublime with Emma and hoping Hank wakes up. Turns out his mind for now is a big blank room.

So she can’t get any info off his skull, and neither of the two think what happened with Beak adds up. Something is up here. Their also coming down with colds which will be important later. And just as important.. Magneto is becoming a symbol among people and merch sales with his image are on the rise.  We then get this. 

So Jean is trying to be a supportive, honest wife, and while the questions incredibly insulting.. his answer is equally so. Spoilers, as mentioned we do get an answer long after this.. and they did not. So Jean is wrong to be suspcious, at this point, but is at least trying to be polite about it and gave him the benifit of the doubt.. and Scott basically said he slept with her without actually saying it despite not having to. You could’ve said “no we did not have sex, we simply talked all night”. It’s not ENTIRELY better given the horrible state of their relationship right now, but it’s still better than HEAVILY implying he rocked her body to the break of dawn for no damn reason. 

So we meet our next major addition to the cast Angel Salvador, an abused teen who is a mutant.. and whose abusive and molesting step dad beats her and throws her out over this. The scene’s a bit overdone, coming off like an after school special.. but it’s what happens AFTER that’s truly heartwrenching. 

A poor scared teenager clutching herself, finding herself homeless alone and desperatly wishing she wasn’t what she was. It’s just a striking image and shows how well Grant uses the mutant metaphor. I could easily see myself in that position had my parents not been good peopl and had I come out far sooner as bi. The idea of desperatly hoping your not what you are simply becaus eof what hell it brings, despite all the joy it can bring too. . it’s heartbreaking to hear. 

Naturally though things don’t get much better as the next morning the U-Men have found her, calling her a freak and successfully kidnapping her.. if only because while she uses acid spit to escape, she flies into a power line. 

We then get Sublimes meeting with Emma and Scott and a BETTER use of teh u-men as while Grant made the horrible mistake of calling them “transpecies”, seriously what the fuck were you thinking, the way sublime frames it here is a MUCH better, much less accidently bigoted concept. 

The idea isn’t bad: A group of humans jealous of the mutants powers, blatantly ignoring the horrible downsides and mountain of persecution that comes with being one. Grant just made the mistake of couching in in Trans metaphors, clearly trying to have the U-Men steal from Trans People too as a way to make themselves seem legit. And I say if you want superpowers.. fine.. wanting to be a superhero or a mutant is fine, the issue with the U-Men is their copoting a culture, trying to be part of mutantkind without having any of the drawbacks and by actively butchering them. It’s why the concept HAS shown up elsewhere; it’s not TERRIBLE, Grant just made a bad creative choice that’s only gotten worse as Transphobia has ramped up further and further. 

Sublime denies it when our heroes bring up Hong Kong.. but naturally he’s simply just keeping them talking long enough to bring out his trump cards, an army of u-men and a brain in a jar he uses to incapacitate them.. and announces his plan to use the school as an organ farm for his third species. 

Meanwhile Logan finds the U-Men in their truck preparing to rip angel apart.. and given he snikit’s soon after.. i’ts very clear whose REALLY about to get ripped apart. 

Germ Free Generation Part 2: 

Part two begins wth Sublime monologoging about how Mutantkind are just cattle to them and reveals the brain is martha’s, her sucicide having been faked and her brain currently being controlled to use as a weapon. 

So while Johnny monlogues we find out what happened with Wolverine last issue he didn’t cut up the guys yet as they fired their little flichete guns at him... it was about as useful and effective as you’d expect and the massacre you were expecting occurs. Though in a nice bit of reality the fact wolverine’s soaked in blood and just killed a bunch of blood shockingly does not make the already frighttend teen feel he’s safe and she spits acid on him. Logan pours some stuff on the acid, figuring rightly a black ops murder farmacy would have something to counteract it and tells her she’s safe now .. and tells the guy behind him not to try it. He’s stupid and does anyway and likely gets a claw to the head off panel. 

They go to a diner to eat and find a local asshole who threatens them with a shot gun to leave once angel uses her power to digest and goes on a rant about how he snapped his own son’s neck to prevent him being born a freak. Just.. fucking hell this arc is not good for my depression. We get some more angst from Angel and whiel her dialouge is not the best, i’ts a too bit mark millar flavored edgelordy for my taste and if I wanted that i’d go read Ultimates or Ultimate X-Me, her pain is real and Logan helps her through it. 

Back at the Mansion the U-Men are on their way to strike, whlie Jean unaware continues to buckle under the weight of all the shit she’s had to deal with, feeling SOMETHING is making them weak with the colds and something worse is going on and thus tries going to Beak’s mind instead and gently helps talk him through it, showing her grace and empathy.. and in return finding out Charles was the one responsible. The alarms flair up and Jean tries calling the police now that’s an option.. but it goes exactly how you’d expect. 

Also a second artist took over for this issue and the next Igor Kordey. He’s fine, but not nearly as good as Quitely or Van Sciver and it shows. Meanwhile Beast awakens and heads for the body drawer with Cassandra’s body, and professor’s mind in it. 

However Jean’s finally had enough and got her second wind. She’s outgunned, outmanned and left to her own devices. And she’s fucking fed up with it. She steels herself and assembles the students. This is obviously a last resort.. but some of them can defend themselves and their going to need to. But today they won’t be learning.. they’ll be teaching and as the U-Men call them defensless Jeans simply asks “Are you sure about that?”

Germ Free Generation Part 3:

So we come to the finale of this arc. Angel is once again an ungreatful brat to logan and he opts to just leave her there if sh’es going to be like that pointing out being a mutant sucks, it’s going to keep sucking.. and she needs to deal with it instead of lashing out at him and herself over it. 

We get back to the U-Men, one of whom is utterly flabergasted they want to him to cut of Cyclops head... only for Emma to awaken.. and take back her regular form meaning she has her telepathy back. The only reason they were able to get her ealier is she was in diamond mode which is stronger but lacks that, a nice way to check and ballance her new powers. She quickly takes them out and disables Martha. 

Back at the school we get one of Jean’s definting moments for me and a true chance to show how badass she can be. Before this while Morrison wrote her well, and his version’s still my favoirite, she didn’t really get to do much and was motly in the background. This arc has been her time in the limelight, having trouble grappling with all the stress of running this place by herself.. and emerging from it stronger, more capable and ready to kick some racist weirdo ass. She tries a few diffrent tactics first, having a mutant with a voice power project it to make them think their san invisible army and having the cuckoos fuck with their heads but when both fail, Jean REALLY gets to show off. Thier blade ammo gets turned into a cool looking 3 dimensioinal shape with her telekneisis, and in a cool moment and a wise use of something gross makes the only one of them with useable powers throw up, before issuing a badass boast, wreathed in flames all while she crumples their guns into uselessness. and tears open their suits. 

Bad ass.. and logan and Angel arrive just in time for the cecendo as hte u-men flee in terror

The Phoenix has been Reborn. Jean Grey has risen from the ashes and returned to full power. 

Meanwhile Sublime is pankcing.. and it gets worse when Emma shows up, fully enraged after all of this and has some words for him. 

Iconic. Emma prepares to drop him out of a building but Scott rightly tries to get her to back off, pointing out the pr nightmare it’d create and the fact that they have enough evidence ot shut him down. Martha however has other ideas and gets him to let go of his own accord, falling to his death.. but given he’d aranged a stunt for the press apparently this gives our heroes deniability and Martha her revenge. 

So we end this three parter as Jean revels in her new power, and Beast returns with an announcment:

Final Thoughts for Germ Free Generation:  This arc is pretty good if forgetable. The struggle of Jean to run the school herself and her rising from the ashes of her own pain at the end with the power of the phoenix at the end is fantastic, finally both giving her a chance to shine.. and a worrying sign for her friends given what her phoenix force copy whose memories she has a copy of, long story, did is awesome. The other parts are okay and ehhhhhhhhh though. Scott and Emma’s investigation into the u-men while having a really good climax, is pretty standard x-men stuff, and Wolverin’es trek with angel is just okay with Angel being highly intolerable during this arc, with Morrison trying a bit TOO hard to make her a “realistic” teen instead coming off as horribly unplesant. She’s supposed to just be lashing out but comes off obnxious as a result. That said this arc does furhter a lot of Morrisons best idea and introduce more, and is a great setup for our next arc, which we’ll get to in two weeks. Soooo

Next Time On X-Men: We find out just what the hell Cassandra Nova is, what her plans are, and what happened with her and charles as our heroes come down with a cold as the might of the shiar empire bears down on them. It’s IMperial in two weeks. 

Next Time ON This BLog: Speaking of long Delayed Projects, I finally return to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as a young Scrooge starts his prospecting career, learning the ins and outs from a rich new mentor, and finding the price tag striking it rich comes with. Raid a copper hill with me tommorow. 

If you liked this review, subscirbe for more, join my patreon, and if there’s a comic you’d like me to cover suggest it in the comments or outright comission a review from me via ask. See you at the next rainbow

[traincat]

Hi traincat! Hope you're doing well. I figured since you have an extensive knowledge on all things Spider-Man, you would know your way around his rogues! I wanted to ask if you have a favorite or one that you find most compelling and why. Thanks a million!

I think my answers for which rogues are my favorites and which I find most compelling and which are widely viewed as the best and why are all pretty wildly different. I do think the popular assessment that Spider-Man has one of the best rogues galleries in Marvel canon is true. Like, I think the absolute best Spider-Main villain story -- the one that gives you the best sense of the villain as a character and also the one that works best at uniting villain and is Kraven’s Last Hunt, which is just incredible on every level. (Content warning for suicide.)

(Web of Spider-Man #32) Also, like, in terms of design, Kraven is great. Love a big Russian game hunter perpetually bare chested and wearing leopard print cropped leggings. That’s not something you get sick of. Only Kraven Sr. for me, though -- I’m less fond of his son, although I think the whole family affairs in Grim Hunt and Scarlet Spider v2 are pretty fun.

On the other hand, though, I think that some of the biggest villains in Spider-Man’s gallery, namely Norman Osborn and Doc Ock, are overused, although I know why they’re overused and it’s because they’re really good villains. (But also you can only make people pay for the same story so many times with only minor variations before it starts to get old.) I think Norman and Peter are pretty perfect opposites, whereas Otto and Peter are mirror images -- although I think generally Norman stories pull off that opposite nature better than Otto stories reveal him as a mirrored image of Peter. 

I think it’s interesting that Otto is kind of the first “big” villain Peter encounters -- he makes his debut in ASM #3, so there are villains that come before him, but they’re like, the Vulture and the Chameleon. And there are great Vulture stories -- love that flying octogenarian -- but like, I would not put the Vulture in the absolute top tier Spider-Man villains. And the Chameleon is a freak.

Same, girl. (Web of Spider-Man #65) 

More villain talk beneath the cut.

By comparison, Otto is the first villain to actually serve Peter a real defeat, the first one to humble him. So I think it’s interesting that they come from very similar backgrounds -- both geniuses, both lonely as children, both people who were in danger of becoming very solitary, isolated adults, which Otto did and which Peter did not. They had a mother figure who verged on at times or was actually smothering in her affections, and a salt of the earth type father figure. And Otto gains his powers after suffering an accident with radiation much the same way Peter does. It’s one of the things that disappoints me about Superior Spider-Man, because I don’t think it plays into the idea of Otto and Peter as mirrored images of each other nearly as much as it could have. Even Otto’s Parker Industries originally showed up in a “bad” version of Peter’s life, where he never got bit by the spider and instead becomes a CEO:

(Sensational Spider-Man #41) “You prove yourself to everyone -- except yourself.” Which is what Otto is continually trying to do, and which is what he always falls short of. So it’s interesting that there’s kind of all this set up here and that the actual comics sort of continually fall short of it. 

Green Goblin stories live up to their rep a little better, in my opinion, and they’re better at playing into those parallels. Norman and Peter are both self-made men, but Norman is rich and Peter is not. Peter accepts responsibility and fault; Norman does not. Norman’s life is devoid of women, while Peter’s is full of it. If Norman and Peter are both studies in masculinity, then Norman’s is toxic and Peter’s is not. Peter is capable of growth; Norman is entrenched in this role he’s made for himself -- he is not capable of sustained growth beyond the role he’s made for himself. There’s a reason I think Norman gets used so much and it’s because it’s a heady dynamic to kind of play into -- especially when you go with the relatively more recent angle of things where Norman kind of views Peter as the perfect heir, worthy where Harry is not. Honestly, it’s a good time whenever you’re involving Harry in the mix at all, as someone caught between these two very powerful figures and how the tug-of-war there for ownership of him is just completely soul destroying. 

(Spectacular Spider-Man #180)

But I do think Norman is overused, and it’s gotten a point where in Amazing Spider-Man #800 it was like -- oh, what, he’s going to kill Flash? He’s going to kill someone else Peter loves? He’s killed like half the main-main cast at this point. He’s behind the murder of Peter and Mary Jane’s baby, he’s responsible for Ben Reilly’s death, he killed Gwen Stacy, Harry’s death goes directly back to him, he’s kidnapped May and Mary Jane and Flash and blah blah blah it’s JUST TOO MUCH. It can’t always be this one guy! You can’t just bring him back every 50 issues like “this time Norman Osborn’s gone too far” when he went too far in the ‘70s. Everything since then has just been trying to recapture the moment he threw Gwen Stacy off the bridge. It’s exhausting. I’m begging Spider-Man, as it starts hyping up yet another Norman story for ASM #850, to do something new.

In comparison to Norman, I think Harry’s run as the Green Goblin is fairly flawlessly executed as far as villain stories go, especially in its final hour. Spectacular Spider-Man #200 is really one of my favorite single issues of all time. Harry has the pathos that Norman really never does -- you can feel for Harry in a way that you can’t feel for Norman. And it’s because Harry loves Peter -- really, truly loves him -- that his acts of villainy take on that special edge of cruelty. It doesn’t just hurt Peter that these things are being done; it hurts Peter that these are being done and that it’s Harry doing them and that, in a lot of ways, they both blame Peter for why Harry is doing them, even if at the end of the day it’s in no way Peter’s fault. And then there’s the utterly perfect moment as Harry dies in Spectacular Spider-Man #200, that his act of triumph is that he can’t bring himself to kill Peter, because he loves him too much. It’s perfect. I live in fear they’re going to make Harry a villain again and try to replicate it only to fall painfully short. 

I think the Jackal is actually underutilized because he is in my honest opinion the scariest Spider-Man villain, or at the very least the creepiest. Where Norman can only dream of remaking Spider-Man in his own image, the Jackal actually does that with Ben Reilly -- and, to a lesser extent, with Kaine, his first damaged clone. He’s a good lurker, too, less show-y than either Otto or Norman. He lurked in the background for a while. And in a series where I think you can pick a lot of the villains apart as men who take advantage of their power, having the Jackal be a college professor whose villainous career stems from his obsession with one of his students fits right in. And he’s just creepy. He’s upsetting! The things he does to the clones -- both the Peter and Gwen clones, although I think the comics are not so great at letting the Gwen clones shine as individual characters, which is something I wish someone would actually do something about -- are very upsetting, especially since you can extrapolate from a lot of Kaine’s stories and the things we know bother him and how he’s consistently paralleled against Janine Godbe, that both Kaine and the Gwen clones were sexually abused by the Jackal. (Spider-Man’s not typically shy about examining darker subjects, and while we can only extrapolate from canon with Kaine, it’s extremely there on the surface with the Gwen clones. I mean, he married one.) And honestly, the villain who’s whole schtick is cloning makes more sense as someone who can repeatedly come back from anything than Norman’s deal of Corrupt Businessman Surprisingly Hard To Kill. I’ve said before that Peter appears to have a bit of a loophole in his personal moral code when it comes to violence that either has no consequences or lessened consequences, like when he cuts loose against Wolverine, someone who has a healing factor, or when he buried the Juggernaut, supposedly indestructible, in concrete. The Jackal as someone who could and has clone himself repeatedly opens up similar doorways -- what’s to stop Peter from cutting loose if the Jackal isn’t confined to this one body? There’s a lot to play with there and a lot more interesting spaces to go than, say, having to invent increasingly poor excuses for why Peter hasn’t taken more permanent action with Norman if Norman is always going to return to do harm to someone beloved to Peter.

Finally, I’m in a weird spot with personal favorite villains because honestly my instinct is to say the Lizard. And that’s an issue because of one fairly recent storyline and everything that’s spun out from it: Shed (Amazing Spider-Man #630-633), the storyline where Curt Connors loses all control over the Lizard, kills, and partially devours his son Billy. Like, I LIKE grim dark Spider-Man comics, and Shed is honestly too much for me -- not because of the Lizard’s actions, but because in the story Peter fails to save Billy. And I say not because of the Lizard’s actions because I think, as fun as a giant lizard man in purple pants and a lab coat can be, I think Curt Connors makes for one hell of a supervillain metaphor for domestic violence. 

(ASM #365)

(Spectacular Spider-Man v2 #13) And it’s very compelling. There’s a lot of things to explore down that alley. But once you actually go as far as having the Lizard kill his son, you can’t take that back. And the problem is, that’s what Spider-Man comics have tried to do post-Shed. It feels weird and deeply out of character to have writers assume that Peter could forgive the murder of any child, let alone a child he knew, and have him continue his relationship with Curt Connors. It’s a weird message to go “yeah, he ate his kid, but he wasn’t in control, and he made up for it via cloning, so we’re all good now.” Like imagine trying to spin that in any horror movie. It doesn’t work -- that your villain kills his kid and then clones him and pretends everything is okay now would be the plot of the horror movie. Spider-Man is a series fundamentally built on the fact that actions have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are utterly unfixable. Peter can’t go back and intercept the burglar to prevent Uncle Ben’s death. He can’t clone Uncle Ben and wipe that incident out of history. So to have a story like Shed in continuity as something that doesn’t alter Peter’s perception of Curt Connors forever doesn’t work.

Anyway that’s why my favorite villain is the Shocker. Love that quilted bastard.

[thehollowprince]

Extremely broad question: What's your overall opinion about the X-men movies produced by 20th Century Fox? How do you think they handled the franchise? Which movies did you like and which ones did you hate?

20th Century Fox made X-Men movies?

Huh?

I must have missed that.

(shifty eyes)

No, in all seriousness, I don't like to associate those films with the X-Men in any capacity. Those were not the X-Men. They were like the MCU version of Peter Parker and his friends: completely original characters that utilize aspects of the beloved characters to draw people in with a sense of nostalgia while delivering this weird Frankenstein creation.

If we get right down to it,, there were so many things wrong with Fox's attempt to do an X-Men franchise that its hard to try and narrow it down, but I'll do my best.

1: Those Aren't the X-Men!

I said already that those aren't really the characters from the comics that we know and love. They're caricatures of those characters, with just enough of their core attributes there to trick people into seeing these movies. There is no sense of actual teamwork or a Found Family dynamic, which is an intriguing part of the X-Men narrative. Instead, the X-Men of these films act more like the MCU Avengers, a bunch of casual superpowered acquaintances who tolerate each other for the sake of a common goal.

There is no sense of any actual teamwork and the few times the team work together, they're a patchwork of fan favorites plucked from various different incarnations of the team. At first glance, that would be fine because the Team has been very unofficial. There is no standing roster of "active X-Men" in the comics, because its not a job for them. Its usually whoever is at the mansion or is nearby at the time and can help because the mutants are in danger. In the movies, they just threw a bunch of fan favorites together and said "Yeah, that's good enough." There's no attempt to utilize the relationships between the different characters because aside from one or two characters (usually Logan/Wolverine and Magneto) the movies treat the other members of the team as side characters. Place fillers who don't actually get any real stories.

And then there's the casting.

Casting non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters (Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender for Magneto/Ellen Page for Kitty Pryde) and then butchering them even further (Evan Peters as Peter Maximoff instead of Pietro). And I don't know what the fascination is with making Professor Xavier British (Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy).

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of these actors, but they shouldn't have been cast as these characters that have decades worth of history regarding their ethnicities and cultures.

The biggest one right now is probably Henry Zaga in the role of Roberto Da Costa (aka Sunspot) in The New Mutants movie that will never actually hit theaters. While they did improve somewhat over the last time they introduced the character (played by a Mexican actor despite the character being Brazilian), they completely ignored the fact that Roberto is black. He was introduced as Afro-Brazilian and, as you can see, Henry is not.

In their defense, I myself forgot that Berto was black, because the more modern comics portay him as lighter skinned

See?

But that's not an excuse, and they should have done better.

And while we're on the subject of Roberto, I want to talk about his portrayal in Days of Future Past, namely the fact that this...

... wasn't Sunspot. The powers this character exhibits is more indicitive of Sunfire, a completely different Japanese mutant. Its not just him, as they've done this before with characters like Callisto and Kid Omega and Psyloche in the disastrous The Last Stand. That's another point in favor of The New Mutants, in that, af least they managed to get the powers right, from what I've seen in the trailers.

Sadly, I'm still probably going to see The New Mutants when it comes out, because that's my favorite X-Team and with Disney buying Fox, its probably the only time I'll get to see these characters on a big screen in a staring role.

2: The Timeline

If you ever decide to watch these movies (assuming you haven't already), do yourself a favor and don't attempt to follow the timeline. Time does not flow the same way in those movies as it does everywhere else.

It was fine, at first, until we got to Days of Future Past, at which point they dabbled in a form of time-travel that just made everything so much more confusing. Reintroducing characters and erasing others and then there's the fact thst that the prequels encompass three decades and yet none of the characters seem to age at all.

It was confusing as hell, especially when you factor in Logan and Deadpool, neither of which seem to take place in the actual mainline X-Men timeline(s).

It honestly hurts my head just thinking about it.

3. Directors

I'm going to be honest and say I really considered just titling that Bryan Singer, because he's reason enough to hate this franchise.

Just in case you don't know, Bryan Singer is a predator and a pedophile, sexually abusing several underage men working on his films. The original actor that played Pyro was seventeen or eighteen at the time of the filming of the first X-Men movie and he filed a suit against several of Singer's cronies.

Then there's the more recent story that, during the filming of X2, he took some sort of narcotic before filming one day and got Hugh Jackman injured.

This man also refused to allow any of the comics to be in set, because why would you make a movie based on a long-running comic series and have the source material there. That's just crazy. Granted, it wasn't just him, as the director of Dark Phoenix (Simon Kinberg) reportedly said he never even read the comics the story was based on.

It makes it all the more infuriating when people praise his X-Men movies as the superior ones.

And then there's Brett Ratner, who outed an eighteen-year-old Ellen Page on the set of The Last Stand, and was just all around unpleasant to work with.

TL/DR - the X-Men movies are rather like the MCU, in that there are occasional gems and great visuals in an otherwise steaming pile of shit. I loved the future sequences in DoFP, and the invasion of the X-Mansion in X2, but there comes a point where you have to ask yourself if its worth digging through the shit to find the few good things. I don't hate them, but I don't love them either. I just wanted... more.

[asagimeta]

you've hit the nail on the head with why the greatest Hero films are becoming, increasingly, NOT ones from the MCU. Disney has a formula for how a Hero Movie should play out, and it holds so rigid to it that there's only a small handful of the MCU movies that are sheer standouts. it's why I believe that we'll never get the Sinister Six in the MCU, however subtly the writers are setting it up, is that kind of villain team-up CAN'T happen in the MCU.

You’re completely correct, Marvel has won the “war” for superhero movies up until now because at the time a connected universe WAS a new thing- and at the time, people weren’t taking risks with superheros on the big screen, only Marvel was, you still had the same Spiderman Origins and the same Batman stories and no one really cared, when people started really caring, the MCU did some really innovative stuff by showing that superheros could delve into more genres than just “action”- they gave us comedy and drama and so much more.... and then they stopped

And that’s where they went wrong

I think GOTG was the peak of the MCU because it’s the peak of their innovation- and weather you like GOTG or not isn’t the point, the point is that they got there, they acheived this huge thing, and then they went “Ok, that’s enough” and stopped

Their biggest problem is that they’re owned by Disney and that means that they’re only allowed to produce your standard bleached out ultra-clean PG-13 “family films” that aren’t allowed to truly touch on anything mature and that does superheros in general such a disservice

Superheros- including Marvel- have a really long history of having darker edges to them, so much about even your most well known superheros like Wolverine has been washed for the big screen and it’s really unfortunate, and wile DC is willing to lean into that- I don’t mean with Dark Gritty like Batman VS Superman but more like Joker, as “gritty” doesn’t actually equal “dark”- Marvel clearly isn’t- not right now anyway

Superheros have finally become an accepted part of adult pop culture (to a point anyway) and that means that it’s time to start letting the adult nature of superheros come through, this is part of what I love so much about the Arrowverse in particular, because you don’t just get your young adult story with The Flash, you also get the story of a later middle-aged superhero with Black Lightening who has older kids, and you’ll get an earlier middle-aged superhero with Superman (& Lois) who has a couple of young kids but is still a veteran at the super thing, you get total newbies like Batwoman and you get the in-betweens like Supergirl who have been doing this for some time but are still young enough and new enough to make mistakes

So far, Marvel cuts off their leads at their late 30s/early 40s (give or take a bit) and hasn’t even allowed for any of them to also be parents or to be in any stage of life that isn’t the early-mid stage of superheroing

But anyway

Along with removing the actual literal age of superheros because of this, by making them so squeaky clean, it’s as you said, you have no room for REAL anti-heros or honestly likeable villains to carry their own movies or to have horror as a potential genre or to have heros that defy what’s seen as The Usual- IE: queer heros, disabled heros, older heros, etc

And we know that villain/antihero movies CAN be extremely big successes, IE- Joker, Suicide Squad, and Birds Of Prey but the closest Marvel will come isn’t even antiheros, it’s GOTG, wich are just “Superheros who aren’t as morally righteous or polite as Captain America” honestly

The worst part is that we know- and THEY know- movies based on Loki or Erik Killmonger would be huge successes but we’ll never get that because it wouldn’t be “clean” enough, instead the villain Marvel banked so much on was a really dried out Thanos who doesn’t even have the same motivations from the comics, they tried to make him “So morally complicated that you could almost see him as a hero in the right light if you squint” instead of cashing in on a villain you can EMOTIONALLY connect with like Loki or Killmonger

I agree with you completely, we’ll probably never get Sinister Six, and even though they’re doing “the next phase of Avengers” with things like passing the mantle onto Sam to be Captain America and giving the “lead Avenger” status to Spiderman, they’re never going to do Young Avengers- or, even more horrifyingly, they’ll either straightwash or completely omit Hulkling and Wiccan

Marvel is one of Disney’s biggest cash cows and they’re completely cutting their own foot off here because they’re so terrified of losing that “family freindly” audience and the overseas audience that they’re completely ignoring a massive part of the superhero market, not to mention the biggest part of that market: Superhero fans

Meanwile DC will start to climb by utilizing the one thing they have that Marvel doesn’t: Diversity, both in story, and in charector (IE: allowing for all female teamups, main queer charectors, middle-aged black men to have their own shows, etc) and new companies and studios will rise up and make their own places

I’m really excited for the Brightburn universe, for example, of superhero themed horror movies, and I really look forward to more non Marvel/DC imprints to get made like what they did with Hellboy, now is the time my babies!

[u23art]

My Grievances With Jonathan Hickman and His X men

I had no idea who Hickman was, in the time leading up to the House and Powers of X, I only heard second hand information about his previous work at Marvel. I knew a minimum amount of details about him turning Mr. Fantastic evil or putting Captain America and Ironman at each other’s throats, again. After the X men had been in a drought for years as far as excitement was concerned, I was welcome to the idea of any sort of shake up after the writers had finally sent the past versions of the original 5 X men back to the time they came from. 

I stuck with House and Powers of X during the issue’s releases over 12 weeks. I won’t deny it started off intriguing. Xavier had returned with a mission, his brain no longer being hijacked by the Red Skull. The X men were gathering and refocusing their efforts. One large change being that the X men had a home again, trading the Xavier School for gifted Youngers for the entire living island of Krakoa. The biggest change of all was the X men’s newfound collateral with the Human race; 3 lifesaving drugs to better the quality of human life before they disappear while more of the populace evolves into mutants and they’re inevitably replaced. 

Even the “truth” about Charles Xavier didn’t seem so bad at the time. Xavier apparently had advance knowledge of many of Mutantkind’s fates thanks to Moira Mactaggert’s suprise mutant power of reincarnation, which in retrospect isn’t so much a mutant power and is more of a cheat code courtesy of the universe. However, my opinion changed when the X Men went on a mission into space to destroy a sentinel factory orbiting the sun. They all died, or at least, those bodies did.

 According to John Hickman, Cerebro was more than a Mutant finding machine, it was a device to copy the minds of every mutant it located and put it into a storage collective. The constantly updated data is then uploaded into a new copy of the individual’s body, courtesy of Krakoa. This was performed in a ceremony troublingly similar to that of a baptism, turning the X men from people into something more like replaceable apostles or mouthpieces for Xavier’s plan.

X men comics have had many writers over the decades that brought in changes to shake up and update the X men for new audiences. 

John Byrne and Chris Claremont injected individuality into the earlier incarnations of the team and introduced Kitty Pryde and started shifting the team dynamic to a family dynamic.

Scott Lobdell helped to orchestrate the Fatal Attraction arc and truly pushed Charles Xavier to an emotional breaking point, showing us an emotional vulnerability from the stoic teacher we’d never seen before.

Grant Morrison finally made the Xavier “School” an actual school and not a training facility.

Joss Whedon managed to pick up the pieces after Morrison’s run ended and set the team into motion despite Charles Xavier being out of the spotlight.

Each one of these men breathed new life into this beloved team with new ideas too. Hickman also has ideas, however he explores these ideas at the expense of character development, not to mention he basically invalidates decades of story-telling to say that he had the true story the whole time. Charles Xavier has always been a teacher, I don’t think it would be unfair to say that Xavier would never treat the lives of his X men so casually in all his years offering his home to them, Charles Xavier would keep tabs on mutants but never “collect” them without their knowledge only to copy them, and Charles Xavier is just as human on an emotional level as anyone can be.

I think the idea of gathering mutant consciousness into one giant mass of intelligence to create a God is a cool idea, but the characters aren’t growing as a result of this idea. What Hickman has done is essentially jerry-rig the characters to stagnantly go about their duties in order to explore the idea. The X men have become the tools of Charles Xavier, or rather, they have become the tools of John Hickman.

There were ways to introduce these ideas without compromising the character’s status as people. For starters, let Charles learn what Moira knows in a more recent context rather than making it a secret he’s kept to himself most of his life. Secondly, instead of reducing the X men to data, just make Krakoa a source for advanced healing. Thirdly, SHOW this Mutant nation being built with a little more skepticism from it's residents rather than show these characters gather and accept all these revelations with the conformity of a cult.

And furthermore for the sake of fairness, the concept of data being human after all has been done successfully. However it works in stories like Ghost in the Shell, Nier Automata or Star Trek: The Next Generation; stories where either the concept of identity is flimsy from the get go due to circumstances constantly switching characters through multiple bodies OR a character is data from their inception and they yearn to learn. Doing this with the X men just feels like a hollow plot device.

Thank ya Hickyman, you have dampened my enthusiasm for my favorite hero team. 

Oh, and you let Wolverine do WHAT? He’s been a home wrecker for decades and you’re just giving him access to Jean? The internet can celebrate Scott, Jean and Logan having kinky threesomes, but I can’t ignore that Wolverine has been acting selfishly for years when he has a number of his relationships with women that have ended in failure. Years of fan fiction and guy on guy art have not changed the fact that Logan and Wolverine are never and have never seen eye to eye morally or ethically and are incredibly unlikely to start having sex in the same bed.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

I’m reading and so far enjoying Absolute Carnage a whole heck of a lot and I’m thinking to myself why is that? Why in fact is this story working for me when most other crossover event stories don’t? This inevitably led me to think about what those few event stories I do like even are.

Off the top of my head Contest of Champions II, World War Hulk, Annihilation, Annihilation Conquest and at the tippy top Infinity Gauntlet (the main book not all the tie-ins) and Secret Wars 1984.

I started to notice some things.

a)    Almost all of these stories are built upon a fundamentally simple premise (Annihilus invades space, the heroes fight in a tournament, Thanos becomes God, etc)

b)    A lot of them are event crossovers that don’t characters from multiple franchises in big ways in the stories. That is to say lots of heroes show up in Infinity Gauntlet but the number of really truly central characters in it is relatively small and don’t include like half a dozen people from X-Men, F4, Spider-Man, Midnight Sons, etc

c)    Most of them are very action heavy

Why is it these factors contribute to making an event crossover successful?

Well to the first point, it’s simply put because by having a clear cut hook it allows all the tie-ins and such to not veer too far off course for that premise and allows the main book to keep it’s eye on target as it were.

The second and third points are I think interconnected.

See when you really break it down, it takes a whole heck of suspended disbelief to make the Marvel universe work.

And I don’t mean because you have to accept the conceit of radioactive spiders or lizard formulas. I mean because you have to accept that stuff and mutants, high tech suits, confirmed aliens, confirmed deities of every religion, confirmed parallel timelines, dimensions and universes, time travel, etc.

Consider for a moment how Lord of the Rings or Star Wars actually demand less suspension of disbelief of audiences because the fantastical elements are all mostly cut from the same cloth and if they aren’t there aren’t THAT many to juggle, so making them mesh together and create a sense of verisimilitude isn’t that hard.

For Marvel though an awful lot of the time to make a Spider-Man or Daredevil story work demands you outright ignore every other Marvel series out there. Look at Aunt May’s current situation dealing with cancer. If you were being realistic within the context of the Marvel Universe there would be at least 3 or 4 obvious solutions to her problem and that’s a very conservative estimate.

This is why I think making good crossover event stories is so difficult, because you need to find a way to balance vastly different concepts and characters, some of which aren’t even tonally on the same page. The X-Men are metaphors for prejudice because they have super powers, but the F4 are wacky superhero celebrity explorers from the Space Race and Thor is a Shakespearean God figure and Captain America is a politically charged figure from propaganda.

This is a fundamental problem with the Avengers. I’ve talked about this before but one of the biggest problems with the Avengers is that their stories tend to be about little beyond just BEING the Avengers. Occasionally it’s more than that, but usually it’s just they are the Avengers and they are Big Damn Heroes who kick ass on a Big Damn Scale. The X-Men in contrast might do that but they also have the idea of adolescence and prejudice to fall back on to give their stories substance. The F4 can do the same as an exploration of technology, weird sci-fi concepts, celebrity and above all else, family. Part of why the Avengers have this problem is because they were intentionally built from characters never designed to work together or in team environments. Neither were some of the X-Men but if you know Wolverine will be on your team then you know he’s fill a certain role and you can sort of tailor the other characters in response to that.

Most comic book event crossovers have the Avengers problem but magnified because now you got dozens of characters not designed to work with all these other characters.

That’s why having a simple hook for an event (like Carnage is going to try and kill everyone who’s worn a symbiote) works so well because it’s something that can easily be applied to any comic as a tie-in.

It’s also why stories like Annihilation or Absolute Carnage work more effectively because they aren’t crossing over everyone, but rather a subset. Annihilation used cosmic characters. Cosmic characters aren’t a monolithic group but there is a certain greater cohesion between all of them collectively as opposed to having Punisher, Doctor Strange, Super Skrull and Conan the Barbarian. The same is true of Absolute carnage which thus far is concerned with Spider-Man characters or street level characters.

Alternatively you can feature large groups of characters who do not really jive together but utilize them as secondary or tertiary characters whilst you instead focus upon a more select cast of figures, preferably with a clear cut central main character to make sure the story remains focussed whilst still having scale.

This is exactly what both Infinity Gauntlet and the film Infinity War did. Neither would have worked if the lead characters were the heroes trying to stop Thanos rather than Thanos himself trying to BE stopped by the heroes.

Finally if you are going to throw all these disparate characters together and make them the point of view focus, not only does having a simple story help a whole hell of a lot, but having an action story first and foremost sells it.

Let’s be real, that’s why the concept of the crossover is enticing. Seeing heroes fight together or one another is the box office draw and by simply making it a fight comic you side step clumsy attempts to have substance that will fall apart when you have literally dozens of characters to juggle who are all conceptually vastly different to one another.

This is the key to Secret Wars’ success. I know it sounds nuts to say having little substance worked in favour of a story, but in this case it really did. By having Doom be the main character and the events be beautifully drawn and paced out action set pieces (set outside the regular books so as not to disrupt them) the story worked like a charm. No fuss, no muss, pick it up enjoy characters hanging out, bouncing off of one another or cool battles and you are done.

It’s a whole heck of a lot better than promising to be about something substantial but falling flat as a pancake like civil War did.

[mrsspidermanmaryjanewatsonparker]

Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #20-23 Thoughts

Previous thoughts here.

Well I’m almost a year late but I’m finally here, the end of Renew Your Vows.

So did it go out on a high note.

...um...no....no it did not.

 Having finally read the entirety of Houser’s RYV run (but not yet her Spider-Girls work which I am expecting to be a kind of epilogue) there are three perennial problems.

a)      The discarding of the established, yet short live, status quo of issue #1-12

b)      The post-time skip status quo evoking memories and idea from Spider-Girl due to featuring Spider-Man’s teenaged daughter

c)       An over focus upon Annie herself at the expense of Peter and MJ

I’m of the belief that the first point wasn’t Houser’s fault, that the second point was partially Houser’s fault and the final point is entirely Houser’s fault and indeed exacerbates the problem of the second point.

This arc could’ve course corrected some of those issues but it didn’t, indeed it added to them and created yet more problems.

Now this isn’t to say issues #20-23 were a shit show. Dan Slott and BND provided too many shit shows for me to have the heart of lumping this arc with that dreck.

But it is a story arc that doesn’t work much more than it does work.

Let’s talk positives though.

Houser continues to write Peter and MJ in character and believably for an adult couple with a kid. Peter having his share of Dad jokes is very nice in fact. The scene where MJ and Peter discuss the situation in bed was simply wonderfully executed, short, sweet and simple as it was. It was an example of how you can write these characters with maturity in a mature relationship whilst making it interesting. A small but very nice bit was when the couple exchange a knowing look of suspicion for a second before swinging off, you could tell they both knew their daughter was lying to them.

Annie is also believable as a teenager and distinguished in her personality from Mayday. Her exchange with her parents at the start of the arc rang very true. In it Peter and MJ are believably concerned for Annie and want to know what she was doing; if you lived in a world of super heroes you’d be suspicious in that context too. Annie also understandably for a teen gets pissed off. Another nice touch in connection to this was how there were consequences for Annie after her last arc, seeing as she is very much grounded but also in more contact with Normie than she was before.

However the two biggest triumphs for this arc were in how it brought up Clone Saga continuity.

I know a lot of people have Clone Saga sore spots, but this issue addressed the topic in way that bypassed even haters of the story.

Peter and MJ’s pain and anger over losing Ben and baby May is palpable and poignant, entirely earned by the situation. More than this it’s just a wonderful source for drama Houser was brave enough to mine when nobody else wanted to touch the topic for something like 20 odd years more or less. The graveyard scene especially is easily the highlight of the arc.

Peter and Wolverine’s exchange at the diner was also done very well. Wolverine’s advise struck true to who he is and their dynamic here is immensely preferable to Houser’s first issue where Peter was played as something of a beta to Logan. In this series they are both seasoned heroes and fathers with a long history so them talking candidly and personally as they did added up. Peter over dramatically breaking a glass and being indifferent to the shards cutting his hand open though...that was just stupid.

Also for what they were the action scenes were decent enough, the first battle between Annie and her ‘clone’ in particular was well done.

That...unfortunately...is where the positives end though.

The single biggest problems with this arc specifically are that it’s overly focussed upon Annie and features Mister Sinister as the villain.

Now you might argue that there is precedence for this in Houser’s earlier work.

However precedence alone is not necessarily justification.

Clearly building up Mister Sinister as the final boss does little in the way of justifying why, in the final arc of this series about Spider-Man and his family our final villain is...an X-Men character...who’s motivations indeed revolve  around the X-Men. The X-Men taking up page time from the Parker family has been a running issue in this series and I don’t get why, of all things, the post-time skip RYV stories chose that  to be consistent about.

Sinister isn’t even an X-Men villain who’s immediately familiar with general audiences. He’s a complicated and somewhat cryptic character whom, if memory serves, has never (or at least rarely) crossed paths with Spider-Man in any continuity. He’s not like Magneto or anything so throwing him into this series, then not really explaining what his powers even are or much of his background is taking the audience for granted. It’s expecting the audience of a Spider-Man comic to have X-Men knowledge (not even simple X-Men knowledge at that) or worse that they should go do their own homework t find out who he is, which is just objectively bad writing.

It just feels like what we’ve been building to for 10+ issues was essentially an X-Men story that happens to involve the Parker family and Normie Osborn. At least the final pre-time skip arc involved the X-Men in a secondary role to the Parker family, it still revolved around them.

The second biggest problem with this arc is with Annie.

Annie and her relationship with her parents doesn’t really grow or develop much in this arc. Now that could be forgiven because she got a fair bit of development in the last arc. But maybe giving her that development was a mistake as her development in this story, the final  outing for the series as a whole amounts to her coming clean about her Spider Sense visions.

That’d be minor development at best, but what makes this worse is...Annie already told her parents about those.

Now maybe I missed something because I took such big breaks between arcs, but Annie told her parents of her visions back in issue #5!

So it’s just a massive continuity flub for Annie to be acting like she’s been keeping it a secret for eight years.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a throwaway line but her concealment of this fact is the crux of her arc in this story and of her relationship with her parents, playing into the resolution of the story and even the very last page.

It just breaks the narrative.

Now in fairness if you ignored every story before Houser’s run, Houser does a good job of realistically justifying how and why Annie kept it a secret and her reveal of it is humerous. But nevertheless...it doesn’t make any sense.

It doesn’t help that between Spidey’s teenage daughter have spider sense future visions and the plot revolving around a possible clone of said teenage daughter created in secret Osborn labs and her wearing a mostly blue outfit this arc is seriously evoking Mayday Parker’s adventures.

Possibly this was intentional as we find up subverting the expectation of clones when we learn that in fact the ‘clones’ are just...genetically engineered beings grafted powers from Annie’s stolen DNA.

Whilst this provides something different it’s also in truth kind of...less dramatic than if they had in fact been clones. That way you could’ve even shallowly touched upon themes of identity and said something about who the Parker family is. Instead they’re about as poignant as Blood Spider.

The arc is further hurt by not really properly explaining how or why Annie was able to see the future/see through the eyes of the mutates with her powers. In fact it tries to claim that this only happens when her ‘clone’ is focussed upon her and yet the first vision she has is when her ‘clone’ attacks some tourists. How/why was she focussed upon Annie in that moment?

The arc’s final major failing is, as I mentioned, with focussing upon Annie at the expense of her parents.

I thought given how Houser’s opening arc was more evenly divided between thee leads and then we got an Annie centric arc and then a Peter/MJ centric issue that we’d wrap up with another arc given over to all of them. But it’s still more Annie’s show than anyone else’s.

Yes we get some inner thoughts from MJ in two issues and a bit more than that from Peter. But it’s mostly there to spice up the scenes they occur in. They offer little insight into the thoughts and feelings of the elder Parkers and they are totally drowned out in comparison to Annie’s inner thoughts.

This is sad because the book isn’t supposed to be about Annie but the family as a whole.

But Houser’s approach in this arc tries to strike this weird arrangement wherein the scheme at play is about the X-Men, but the plot is focussed upon Annie’s side role within that plot, but also tries to give time over to Peter and MJ as severely beta leads to Annie.

And it consequently renders the arc as neither an X-Men story, nor a Parker family story and a weaksauce Annie story.

It’s like this arc is ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ but if Rosencrantz got much more focus than Guildenstern....but then their story is a fleshed out side story in like Macbeth instead of Hamlet so they’ve got little reason to actually be involved in the central conflict but are anyway.

It’s such a weird creative choice.

Now I’ll still go to bat for Houser, and still argue she should do more Spider-Man work. Her problems on this book nevertheless show me she gets these characters. But I think now the series is wrapped up it’s fair to say she got the premise of Renew Your Vows but let her preference to write for Annie (the character who’s been around for less than 5 years and who as a teen is practically a blank slate) compromise the job she was assigned to do. Because as I said, it’s not like it’s just this arc. Annie got a lot of focus in every issue under Houser sans issue #19.

Other smaller problems with the arc include:

-          Annie’s dream might’ve been a something of a rip-off of ‘Fearful Symmetry’, an early episode of ‘Justice League Unlimited’ in which Supergirl witnesses the actions of her murderous clone during her dreams.

-          It’s made seriously unclear what Annie’s ‘clone’ did t the tourists she attacked or indeed why she attacked them at all

-          Annie’s ‘clone’ has an okay design but it becomes rather banal when you see it repeated with the other Parker ‘clones’

-          The names for the ‘clones’ are rather over complicated and dull. They do make a nice joke or two out of this though

-          There was little point in having Normie grow six arms beyond cheap tension and a dash of fanservice

-          The climax had some nice jokes about how Peter hated their family car, but it seemed out of place in context and also I find it hard to believe Peter would go quite as far as he did in wrecking the thing

-          The final moments of the arc and series as a whole feel very pat and uninspired. Like Houser had to wrap it up for the sake of wrapping it up because they needed to move onto the next thing

-          The art was a bit sketchy and felt unfinished

My kneejerk reaction was to give this a C- but looking back I gave the last major arc that too and that was definitely better than this.

So I guess...D+I hate sending this series off with that grade but it is what it is.

Hopefully Spider-Girls will be an improvement

P.S. I also just remembered Wolverine referenced Hank McCoy but...didn’t he die back in like issue #6 or 7? wtf

[musesofconstantchange]

We Have To Talk About Batman

So, I just read The Batman Who Laughs #3 and Detective Comics #998, and I can’t hold it in anymore. We need to talk about how Batman is the worst character in comics right now. 

For those unaware, the previous holder of this title was Deadpool, but previous luminaries include Cyclops, Wolverine, Hal Jordan, and many others. Rather than talk about all of them, let’s focus on Deadpool and why he held it, and you’ll likely grasp why the others did as well. 

First, Deadpool at his best is a humorous, witty character who swaps between moments of humor with striking, honest takes on serious topics. He is both comic relief and the character that points out the moral incongruities in the protagonist’s actions. As a protagonist, he is well suited to commentary on many things, because of his nature as an outsider sort of character. At his worst, he’s the signal to the reader that nothing that follows his appearance matters, because his existence is akin to throwing the stakes out the window. At his worst, he’s the character that derails anything resembling tonal consistency, and at his worst, he’s the character to whom all others are sacrificed in order to keep him from coming off as a psychotic madman that ruins everything. At his worst, he’s the character that all others must prostrate themselves before, no matter what he’s done, because to accept that this character is flawed is to call into question the writer’s ability to actually write a nuanced character, and we can’t have that. 

You can probably tell already how all of the other mentioned characters have fallen into this trap whenever they become extremely popular, as writers with more interest in being attached to a hot property than writing good stories use them. So it was when Wolverine was the hottest character in comics, so it was when Hal Jordan was the next hot shit, so it now is with Batman. 

Of course, the problem with Batman is that Batman is a character whose main flaws have been around so long that they are now parody; everyone jokes about the ‘i’m the goddamn batman’ line, and laughs at the ‘who wins in a fight, x or batman with prep time’ joke, but these hide the fact that the character of Batman himself has become the biggest mary sue in comics today. His entire character has been so flanderized, so utterly lost inside the infinite layers of parody and lack of self awareness, that all joy has been lost from the character. 

Let us be honest here: the core idea of Batman is not the problem. There is a reason that there are so many Batman cartoons, and it is in no small part because Batman as a character is an almost universal one. A child suffers a great tragedy and uses that as the moment where he begins his heroic journey towards making things better. This is neither dumb nor uninteresting. 

The problem is that writers of batman have, for a very long time, been very uncomfortable with the idea of who Batman is. Batman at his best is a detective, a man of science and reason and restraint, a man who resists his darker urges in comparison to the obsessives that make up his rogue’s gallery. He is a mortal man, a flawed man, but he is always a man, in that he is human and not a god. It is why he is a member of the “trinity” and the Justice League, because he is the mortal element. He is the perspective of the common man compared to the near godlike beings ( Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Martian Manhunter ) and cosmic focused heroes ( Green Lantern, Hawkgirl ) that he is surrounded by. He is the one that can say ‘look, you all mean well, but remember how you look to the normal guy.’ 

But this Batman is not popular with writers. Indeed, ever since The Dark Knight Returns, the version of Batman that has become the most common is the paranoid, near psychopathic, almost godlike messiah figure who is always right, who is never wrong for taking immoral actions, whose character all others are sacrificed to in order to ensure we all know how great he is. This Batman isn’t a mere man who uses his inherited wealth and sense of right and wrong to try and make the world a better place. This Batman is someone who is the best at everything, who constantly treats friends, allies, and family members as disposable or hindrances, who sees nothing wrong with spending his time planning on how best to kill all his friends and family, and who must constantly be shown to be smarter and better than all around him. 

This Batman is a super rich mega genius who has been trained by all the world’s best people, who can never be physically defeated by anyone or mentally outwitted by them. This is Batman, invincible ninja playboy billionaire genius. 

It has always been rather egregious on some level, but as time has gone by, successive writers have only deepened the problem, incrementally moving further and further towards the complete mary sue he is today. The fact that Batman needs a giant robot suit, the fact that Batman could put together such a thing somehow despite it requiring genius level knowledge in robotics and electrical and mechanical engineering, speaks to the levels of broken the character is. When movies are made where the concept of Batman vs. Superman is created to justify the existence and need for a giant robot suit so that Batman, a mortal man, can fight godlike beings, you are fundamentally failing to grasp the character and what that character is supposed to be. 

Example, from the recent and aforementioned Detective Comics #998: 

Ah yes, because you know what Batman needed? A giant robot suit that was put together by the Justice League with all their powers because he wasn’t awesome enough. Also, that ‘weakness’ that’s described? That’s not a weakness, which we the reader find out about it when he literally pushes it to the extreme and he’s completely fine from doing so. 

But I can understand how this might come off as just me being mad that Batman has his own Iron Man suit. It’s not. The suit itself is not the issue. It’s what the suit represents that is. Because the whole reason that this exists in this is because Batman can’t stop going to people who trained him, which is basically half the known DC universe. It’s not just that he studied under Wildcat, best fighter alive, and Zatara, best escape artist alive, and Jason Blood, best fear creator alive, and Dr. Stone, one of the greatest inventors in the DC universe. The list goes on. Batman has a staggering amount of former tutors, who apparently imparted upon him near infinite knowledge of all things. 

And it’s not just this near omniscient knowledge of everything either. He’s also physically better than everyone. He’s a master martial artist of a dozen styles who also knows every weapon style known to man. Oh, and apparently he’s also one of the best marksman on earth. From this week’s The Batman Who Laughs #3: 

Because that’s what Batman needed, more skills! 

And make no mistake, all of this makes Batman extremely boring, which is not something Batman should be. A lot of this can be chalked up to writers literally having no idea how to write a challenge for him anymore. At first, the plan was simply to make all of Batman’s villains overwhelmingly overpowered as well. This is why the Joker is somehow also a super ninja genius of everything who can conjure impossible chemicals and defeat the entire legion of doom on his own because he’s just so powerful and smart and crazy! It’s why most of Batman’s villains don’t even really fight Batman any more, it’s usually Batman fighting himself. As we saw in Kings of Fear, the entire series is nothing but Batman in his own head, the Scarecrow didn’t actually do anything. 

Speaking of Batman fighting himself, let’s talk about Batman: Metal. 

Look, I love me some multi-verse. I love Elseworlds. I think one of the greatest tragedies in comics was the decline of the multiverse concept in comics. But Batman: Metal goes from being about the return of the multiverse to being the latest in a long line of resignations that the only person who can compete with Batman is... Batman himself. 

All the villains are various versions of Batman who, you guessed it, killed all the other members of the Justice League. Now, if you were a crafty, or moderately smart writer, you might realize that having a universe where all your nightmares are real means that this is a great way to show how wrong your character is! After all, it’s made of their beliefs in what things are, not what they actually are, which is why Batman’s idea of him becoming Green Lantern involves him using a hard light ring to make darkness and the like. 

What this should do, is provide the writer with some ability to show how Batman isn’t a one-man show. That when Batman’s idea of what makes those other heroes strong runs up against the real thing, his ideas lose. But no, Batman wins, because Batman always wins, because heaven forbid Batman be wrong about other people. Apparently, Hal Jordan being the greatest Green Lantern means nothing compared to Batmans complete and utter bastardization of the concept of the ring, just as Wonder Woman being a near immortal godlike warrior who’s trained for centuries means nothing compared to Batman in what he thinks is the helmet of Ares. And it’s the same as Batman also clearly being better than the greatest Flash that ever lived because apparently Batman also has complete knowledge of the speed force now. 

But almost all of what I’ve talked about could be reasoned away or excused if the moral center of Batman’s character wasn’t utterly corrupt. Consider this mentality for why Batman has contingencies and plans for every possible outcome, and why he plans for the possibility wherein he’ll need to kill all his supposed friends. The world is a dangerous place, and those people have powers, and you never know what might happen that might cause them to go over the edge. We don’t know what might cause Superman to go rogue and kill everyone. Or what might cause Wonder Woman to destroy the world of man. Or what might cause Aquaman to flood the world in the name of Atlantis! All it could take is one bad day! 

Is that possibly true? Sure. But that’s not the mentality of Batman, that’s the mentality of the Joker. Joker is the one who believes that everyone is just one bad day from turning into a psychotic monster, who believes civility and decency are facades that people use to hide the fact that deep inside we’re all animals and monsters who will eat each other given half a chance. He’s the one who believes that people are all naturally bad, that people aren’t really decent, that anyone can be made into a monster and will give up their morality at the first opportunity. That’s the entire concept of his character and why he opposes Batman. It’s also why Batman opposes him. 

Because Batman at his core is not meant to be an agent of vengeance. He’s not the Spectre. He’s not the Punisher. Batman is supposed to be someone who believes that people are ultimately good, that people are not all one step away from committing atrocities and war crimes, that people are, by virtue of their humanity, good people at heart. Not everyone is good, but people aren’t all monsters inside, and the reason Batman needs to exist is because someone has to stand up for the fact that there are still good people in the world. 

If Batman doesn’t believe that people are good, if Batman believes that everyone is one step away from committing mass murder, then Batman is no different then the Joker. When Batman does things like make spy satellites to gather information on other hero’s weaknesses and bugs the rooms of his supposed family members, he’s not just not being Batman, he’s behaving exactly counter to the very values that Batman should be representing. 

If Batman cannot trust his allies on the Justice League to be good people, then how is he any different from Amanda Waller? If Batman cannot trust his ‘family’ to the point where he feels the need to bug their homes and spy on them, why exactly did he train them? If Batman cannot believe that there is any real good in the world, then why exactly is he Batman? 

Hopefully I’ve demonstrated that the problem with Batman as a character is more than skin deep. The issue of him being an overpowered superhuman being are problematic. The issue of him being a near psychopathic figure whose mental state reads like an episode of Making a Murderer is problematic. The issue of him being completely unmoored from any sort of heroic morality is problematic. 

Taken together, the character represents the worst of mary sue writing. He is a character who routinely commits morally and ethically objectionable actions and suffers no fallout for them; he is a character that all others are constantly made to seem inferior towards; he is a character whose very nature and concept must constantly be revised and changed because the writers cannot bear to let the character whose defining trait is his humanity actually be human. 

He is a character whose jokes have become the reality; where the exaggerations are now the baseline. Batman now is little more than a patchwork of skills and gadgets, of psychosis and grimdark man pain. It would be comedic, perhaps, if Frank Millers All Star Batman and Robin, from which the iconic ‘i’m the goddamn batman’ arises, was some kind of outlier. Yet for all the jokes and derision that comic gets, and rightly so, very little distinguishes it from the mainstream depiction of Batman in comics more generally. The flanderization of Batman is complete, and this is why Batman is now the worst character in comics. 

[theamazingcaptdeadpool]

What is one dream your muse has had that they still remember now? (nightmare or good is up to you!) when your muse was younger, what was their biggest goal/dream? Who are three people closes to your muse, how did your muse meet them? What is your muses biggest fears?

"A lot of my childhood is centered around the army and Captain America. I wanted to be the best I could for my father, until I realised I could never be good enough. And of course, I learned who he really was - and then chased more realistic goals. Captain America always remained my hero, and I've had the pleasure to get to know him quite well." Wade gave a sad, wry smile. He'd take five seconds with Steve over his entire childhood any day. "My dream as a kid was to fight alongside Cap at some point. Stupid, maybe. But I figured if I excelled in the army I could get to do that..." he rubbed the back of his neck, clearly embarrassed. "I used to dream that someone would find me - see me - and take me away. The person of the dream would change, more often than not it was Steve..." he almost whispered the last part. "But it would always be a sort of rescue. A better life."

Wade fell silent for a little moment. You reading this Thanos? I can do silence!

"I know a lot of people, but I don't keep them all that close. I think... I think I sometimes overcompensate. Try to hard. I want to be accepted and adored, and I love attention - but I know I'm a lot to handle, so I'll..." he scoffed and rubbed thighs. "I'll try and pull away... For their sake."

There's a lot of canon comic answers here. Wolverine. Peter Parker. Hawkeye. Shiklah. Ellie. Then there's the movie answers. Blind Al. Dopinder. Weasel. Vanessa... And I'm having a hard time picking. Wade sighed. I'm not going to go with Peter, because we shun Spideypool. I'm not going with Wolverine either, because on this blog, we never actually met him. Not to mention; we're not close. Heh.

"Blind Al is close. Althea. We have to be, given that we live together. In the comics I was hired to assasinate her - in the movie I met her whilst doing laundry. Yeah. Don't ask me how Ryan fucked that up. Anyway, let's go with the movie version, that's the one people seem to know and adore, and besides - it's PG-13. Which this blog is all about."

"There's Colossus, who... oh god. This is complicated. It involves Thor. Doctor Doom. Venom. A new suit. A love affair with the Wasp (sorry Evangeline Lilly) and Colossus dying - then me ressurecting him." Wade would have gotten confused by his own words if he hadn't been there to experience it. Heimdall would have seen it; but his mun? Yeah... Wade cleared his throat before he continued. "In the movies! I met him through the X-Men. He's the guy who always believe in me, and try to make me seem better than I am. Everything my father didn't. He's... nothing short of amazing. A Russian wonder. Really. He's also super duper hot. But... shh..."

"And you know... I have to mention Nathan Summers. Cable. In the comics we met because I fucked up. Then I tried to kill him... We both got injected with a virus that was part of a terrorist thing. God. We ended up sharing dna and had some crazy teleportation adventures. It was this hate/love thing that turned into a friendship... I'd die for that man, if I could. In the movie we met because a kid fucked up. Cable saved my life and at the same time removed his only chance of going back to see his family... After having fixed the timeline."

But that's all canon...

"On this blog, the people off the top of my head are Steve, who's aside from when he kicked my ribs in has been nothing but attractive kind. Bucky who always have been friendly, open and accepting even when I steal borrow his knives and break into his appartment - and Clint. My bestest lover pal. I also run his fanclub. Let me know if you're interested in a membership..."

Wade knew he'd trailed off. He looked at the questions again and sighed deeply...

"My biggest fears... You know." He rubbed the back of his neck before he let his hands drop. "According to Ryan Reynolds - it's cows. It's really not. My biggest fear is not being able to die, ever. I don't think I'm meant to deal with this world for eternity. And it's ironic, really. I got cancer and would have died, but tried to cure it through Weapons-K, and through that and Thanos got "blessed" with immortality." he made air quotationmarks. "Recently I've seemed to upset cosmic powers though, so maybe they can get me sorted." Wade winked, hoping they were watching, listening or whatever their deal was - and where stronger than Thanos so they could reverse his curse. "Like a wise man once sang; Who wants to live forever. Am I right?" Wade inhaled deeply and mouthed a wow. "Got dark fast there, pal. I'm sorry. Thanks for the questions though." He patted their shoulder and pulled them in for a hug. "When I'm done with you - I'm going after all my friends and giving them a hug."